[Nathanial Hendler]’s Apple2Fool growth card for the Apple II family of personal computers is a nifty combine of contemporary and vintage, and supplies a clever suggests of letting the host laptop to (indirectly) obtain the web about WiFi whilst maintaining matters simple from the host computer’s point of view.
It does this by embedding an ESP32 module and a dual-port RAM chip onto an enlargement card. The Apple2Fool, when mounted into a host equipment, presents as a memory location which the host machine can obtain. The ESP32 then usually takes treatment of all the WiFi communications and jobs necessitating net accessibility, and the host computer system directs these jobs (and reads their output) via PEEK and POKE commands.
This usually means that there are two parts of software for any presented activity: one operating on the ESP32 performing the precise do the job, and a person jogging on the Apple II that communicates with the ESP32 on the card by reading and creating to memory. It’s a basic process, and one that [Nathanial] thinks operates really properly for precise duties.
Example programs incorporate issues like scanning and picking out a WiFi network, fetching weather conditions details, and sending a concept to Slack. Earning new programs does indicate having to produce software program on two finishes, but the simplicity of the method also suggests flexibility, for the reason that anything the ESP32 does can have its complexity abstracted absent by the time its data is introduced to the host device. Not that the Apple II is incapable of working with the fashionable web additional specifically we have observed a essential Apple II website server published in Primary.