BlueSCSI v2 - DaynaPORT WiFi!

[Mac84]

I've contributed to the WiFi DaynaPORT wiki in an attempt to make the set up process a bit smoother for you eager beta testers. It now covers some basic steps for both MacTCP and Open Transport methods.

It's very exciting to see everyone testing this out... that WiFi desk accessory is soooo cool!

 

[AvadonDragon]

This is so exciting! I've been waiting for this feature. I'm so glad you guys managed to get it working. Great work!

 

[schreinerman]

@jcs @eric - you made my wish come true! Many thanks!! I wished I had the chance to support the development and originally I wanted to support you by adding the "issue" at the BlueSCSI Github "New Feature: Dynaport SCSI Network Card Emulation". But starting January I got second time father and what to say...

Maybe some comment: I have the BlueSCSI v2 running in my Powerbook 170 and switching the SD-Card is somehow challenging . It would be great, if there would be the possibility to backup the HDD files via WiFi to a FTP / WebDAV server or otherwise to provide an FTP / WebDAV server on the RP2040. Anyhow that's a very high-level request...

 

[jcs]

AppleTalk/EtherTalk over Wi-Fi works now

 

[MacMaster]

AppleTalk/EtherTalk over Wi-Fi works now

Awesome! Confirmed working for me on the latest build. On an SE/30 it takes me about a minute and a half to pull down a 1.4 MB floppy image from a share.

Not sure if it is just me, but one thing I did notice is that the Pico no longer flashes the LED 5 times to indicate no SD card present. I usually use this to get a quick indication that it is running the BlueSCSI code after flashing with the .uf2.

Speaking of LEDs, network activity registers as SCSI activity as far as the activity LED is concerned. Good for troubleshooting, but it looks a bit awkward when wired up to the external HD LED on the front of my Mac. Perhaps there can be a setting in bluscsi.ini to bypass the activity LED for the Network Interface? Or maybe a toggle in that Desk Accessory you are working on.

 

[eric]

I did notice is that the Pico no longer flashes the LED

We had to pull that out because (oddly) it prevented booting the Wi-Fi firmware on the Mac Plus, weird! Something we'll look into

but it looks a bit awkward when wired up to the external HD LED on the front of my Mac. Perhaps there can be a setting in bluscsi.ini to bypass the activity LED for the Network Interface? Or maybe a toggle in that Desk Accessory you are working on.

The LED pin is wired directly to the activity of the SCSI bus, so cant be controlled in software or hardware.

 

[DatMac]

Will this be possible to have both bluescsi sd code and network all in one in the future? would also be cool if you could do a hybrid where the initial code is on the pi and the rest would be a firmware on the sd card to load if there isnt enough room on the pi itself to hold both codes.

 

[eric]

Will this be possible to have both bluescsi sd code and network all in one in the future?

I'm not sure what your referring to here in regards to SD code? You can have multiple HD files and a network device on the same bluescsi, works great.

 

[eric]

@jcs wrote up a great blog post detailing what went into getting Wi-Fi on the BlueSCSI over the past year - https://jcs.org/2023/08/23/scsiwifi

 

[DatMac]

I'm not sure what your referring to here in regards to SD code? You can have multiple HD files and a network device on the same bluescsi, works great.

Oh sorry, i guess i didnt read it correctly that both scsi hd files and the network could work together. I thought it was one or the other only.

 

[alexADB]

Just soldered my BlueSCSI kit with the Pico W yesterday and amazingly it worked immediately with the basic setup.
Then I updated the firmware and followed the very well written set up steps (don't forget to create the ini file and the SCSI ID 4 reservation file.
Everything went super smooth and now my Mac SE/30 has Wifi (kind of Thank you guys for this super cool addition!

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Really awesome stuff -- Soldered a pico W on myself and I used the MacTCP way (no open transport) for both System 6 and 7 on my SE. I'm going to try it on my SE/30 as the 4MB of ram on the SE is just a tad low to reliably browse wikipedia articles using MacWeb.

The DNS settings weren't happy until I made the DNS address match my router (192.168.1.1). Kinda curious but I'm not in tune with that stuff -- I just copied what my modern computer's DNS setting was. -- Anyway something maybe unique to my setup or idk

Very awesome stuff. Really amazing.

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Holy smokes this thing zips on my se/30 (using frogfind to access wikipedia pages) with 7.5.3

Netscape asks for 4+ MB of ram but man does it pay off for web browsing over the leaner MacWeb!!
Ordered 64MB today as Ive been meaning to beef up the /30.
Great stuff!!

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

my router serves up two networks
One is the “xyzblah_5G” and then just the regular “xyzblah”
i couldn’t connect to the _5G one but I could connect to my regular non-_5G one. My log.txt confirmed it never connected to it.

just a heads up to anyone who has trouble— try the non-5G network! Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere already but I do think it’s worth saying it often as I bet it’ll be a common issue for noobs (like me!).

 

[luminescentsimian]

Yeah, the Pico W, and Pi 0w when doing the same thing with a PiSCSI, only support 2.4GHz WiFi.

 

[PotatoFi]

just a heads up to anyone who has trouble— try the non-5G network! Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere already but I do think it’s worth saying it often as I bet it’ll be a common issue for noobs (like me!).

Yeah, the Pico W, and Pi 0w when doing the same thing with a PiSCSI, only support 2.4GHz WiFi.

This is correct, the Pico W only supports 2.4 GHz. It won't be able to see anything in the 5 GHz band, and certainly not the "new" 6 GHz band. I'm always happy to put low-performance devices like this on the 2.4 GHz side, leaving 5 GHz (and soon 6 GHz) for my high-throughput stuff.

Some other stuff that comes to mind:

It is 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4), so I would expect it to be widely compatible with modern access points and home routers, even if they support 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6). To my surprise, the spec sheet says it supports WPA3. 802.11n may seem old, but it's still super adequate for low throughput, IoT-like applications like this. Heck, I'm running 802.11n AirPort Express hardware at home!

As the documentation warns, you'll likely need to provide very good signal strength for it. Not only is the Pico W going to be buried in your machine, but it also has a very small antenna on the PCB. I don't have one in-hand to test, but if you measure anything less than -60 dBm (remembering that -70 dBm is a lower number, we're working in negatives) with a Wi-Fi scanner outside of the machine, you might run into low signal strength problems.

 

[Paolo B]

Amazing job, guys, thanks for making it available to the vintage Mac community!
Today I took out my v2.0 and swapped the Pico with a Pico-W.
One hour later I had my Mac Portable 7.1.1 on line.

Just unbelievable.

Only remark: the MacTCP version on the provided disk image refused to work, returning an invalid address error (Info panel: 2.1, System Software v Z-7.5).
I then replaced it with a copy taken from a 7.5.3 installation and everything got to work fine (Info panel: 2.0.6, System 7.5 Version 7.5.3).

 

[Paolo B]

One thing that I noticed after doing some testing.
As long as I connect to a remote FTP server (for example, an SE30 running Netpresenz) everything works fine.
I can get and put files.

However, switching parts would also be an interesting proposition. So, I installed Netpresenz on the Portable.
It works. I can connect from any client (e.g. iPhone), list, put files, but not get files from the Portable.
Even the smallest text file is causing Netpresenz to crash.

Any clue?

 

[Jason Heiser]

I’m striking out with getting this to work on a BlueSCSI v2 (freshly bought from Joe’s Computer Museum) in conjunction with a 2.5MB Mac Plus running System 6.0.8.

The first problem I encountered was a fatal address error that halted booting at the “Welcome to Macintosh” screen. I think this might have been due to the newer DaynaPort driver from 1997 (v1.2.5) that I tried installing first. It’s same driver linked from Joshua Stein’s blog post to the Macintosh Garden’s page for DaynaPort drivers, which he might have been using with System 7.

After reverting to a fresh installation of 6.0.8 (sourced from the Internet Archive) and installing the older v1.2.2 driver released in 1993—the one that is bundled on the “HD1 BlueSCSI v2 PicoW Setup.hda” disk image—I was able to reach the Finder and get MacTCP 2.1 installed and configured.

But I can’t get a network response from anything, not even from known hosts on my local network. Hitting my router with MacPing results in nothing but timeouts. The hardware diagnostic tool (in the self-extracting archive on the DaynaPort driver disk) claims it cannot find a DaynaPort device.

Here are the contents of the bluescsi.ini and log.txt files:

[SCSI]
Quirks=1 ; Apple
SelectionDelay=0
EnableUnitAttention=0
EnableSelLatch=1 ; On
WiFiSSID=PastureRidge
WiFiPassword=***********

[12ms] Platform: BlueSCSI Pico
[12ms] FW Version: 2023.07.08-dev Aug 26 2023 21:35:31
Flash chip size: 2048 kB
 
=== SD Card Info ===
SD card detected, exFAT volume size: 60318 MB
SD Name: USD00, MID: 0xAD, OID: 0x4C 0x53
 
=== Global Config ===
Reading configuration from bluescsi.ini
Active configuration:
-- SelectionDelay: 0
-- EnableSelLatch is on
 
=== Finding images in / ===
== Opening /NE4.hda for ID: 4 LUN: 0
---- Configuring as network based on image name
---- Image ready
== Opening /HD1 DaynaPORT 7.5.3.hda for ID: 1 LUN: 0
---- Image ready
== Opening /HD2 BlueSCSI v2 PicoW Setup.hda for ID: 2 LUN: 0
---- Image ready
== Opening /HD3 DaynaPort Latest.hda for ID: 3 LUN: 0
---- Image ready
== Opening /HD0 System 6.hda for ID: 0 LUN: 0
---- Image ready

=== ROM Drive ===
Platform supports ROM drive up to 1692 kB
---- ROM drive image not detected
 
=== Configured SCSI Devices ===
* ID: 0, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 82016kB
* ID: 1, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 896kB
* ID: 2, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 102464kB
* ID: 3, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 1536kB
* ID: 4, Type: Network, Quirks: Apple
 
=== Network Initialization ===
Wi-Fi MAC: 00:80:19:52:83:39
Connecting to Wi-Fi SSID "PastureRidge" with WPA/WPA2 PSK
 
Initialization complete!
INFO: Pico Voltage: 3.273V.
Successfully connected to Wi-Fi SSID "PastureRidge"

 

[Byte Knight]

With the BlueSCSI wifi beta, my LC III now has wireless access to AppleTalk file servers and printers, even when in IIe mode (thanks to Petar Puskarich's version of A2SERVER). Great job guys!!