Re: [9fans] building blocks speaking 9p

["Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)" <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

Bakul Shah writes:

> - make it very easy to create hardware gadgets by
>   providing a firmware/hardware building block that
>   talks 9p on the host interface side & interfaces
>   with device specific hardware.

Amen!  I've been thinking about something like this for years.
My specific use case involves controlling radio transceivers.
Right now I do this with assorted Arduino hardware that speaks
GPIO and RS232 (mostly) to the radios, and RS232 to the upstream
"controller" host.  This burns through a lot of serial ports on
the controller.

What I would prefer is to have all those Arduinos connected
to an RS485 multidrop, each exporting a 9p filesystem for the
control interface.  Shoveling the data around on the RS485
"bus" just needs a simple frame wrapped around the 9p packets
that provides device addressing and a CRC.  On the Plan9 side
this just becomes another network type, with ndb handling
the device addressing.

As others have mentioned, having a native Atmel C compiler would
be a real boon here, but there's no reason why this couldn't be
done with an Arduino 9P library.  I haven't investigated if such
a thing exists, although I'm sure it does.

--lyndon

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