TI-H: Mouse & system extensions
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TI-H: Mouse & system extensions
>I don't know if he is technical minded, but he might have meant using
some
>AVR or PIC chips in the process?
>
>>>same size of the screen plugged into the link port so that when the
>>>program reads in the voltage from the touch-screen the program can
tell
>>
>>How exactly are you planning on reading the voltage from the link
port?
Every one is talking about touch pads and mice, and how it is going to
be so slow and stuff, but what about connecting an ALPS Glidepoint
trackpad to the graphlink or even make an AVR or PIC to control it. With
the Microcontroler setup, you could have it simply recognize the serial
mouse and those who have space for a mouse or trackball could plug that
in. the ALPS Glidepoint for the Macintosh has a hardware mouse emulator
that allows it to run with NO DRIVER. If the PC version is the same then
it would simply emulate the standard Serial mouse. It is also
configurable, so it could be a nice addition to the TI-Hardware
colection. Who cares if it is slow. Programs only need to read it when
it needs input from it. If connected through a Microcontroler, it could
handle all the slow stuff and send out a pair of x,y coordinates at the
calcs request. The AVR would act like Macintosh mouse. The driver is in
ROM, and reads the mouse in it's spare proccessor cycles. It then places
it to a memort location that the "ROM toolbox" or the OS acceses. This
makes all programs simply read two coordinates when they request it
rather than call the driver to start processing it. It isn't Identical,
but the idea of using spare cycles and hardware drivers is a good idea.
It means that all the calc needs to do is call the Microcontroller and
ask for the latest data stored to a particular memory location.
Another thing I was curious about was new multitasking OS's for various
calcs. I've read about some, but what if you could create a type of
system extention or driver that would remain active even after you quit
the shell. It would run in the background and add various features to
say, TI-BASIC, such as adding commands. I think adding link control
commands, simple, 1-bit sound commands, and MOST OF ALL, the PEEK and
POKE comands from real BASIC. If TI-BASIC had PEEK and POKE, you could
use TI-BASIC to dirrectly control the link port, screen, access memory,
and lots of other cool stuff. You could even run assembly routines by
accessing them from BASIC. Is this in any way or form possible. I assume
it is, but I just don't know how difficult it would be.
If this was implimented, would it be possible to impliment librarys that
would contain the code to send and recieve I2C and Expander protocol.
such devices could then be used by BASIC!
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