Take your TI-83 Plus online with a TIWiFiModem

Monday, 27th March 2023

One of the issues holding me back with my development of the Light Gun Commando project (aside from a lack of free time due to the day job) was running out of prototyping breadboards and the difficulty of swapping between different console adaptor boards for testing.

Normally by this point I'd have started soldering together more permanent prototypes on little circuit boards, but I've been having a difficult time with the boards I've got in stock apparently being made of a metal that's impossible to solder to. They were very cheap, but for some reason the solder joints would end up coming out blobby, make poor connections, be prone to bridges and generally not "wetting" the pads at all. This makes hardware prototyping very frustrating and time-consuming, and though I'd tried different solder (no change), different temperatures (higher heats just meant the pads would unglue from the board more quickly), more flux (just more cleaning required afterwards) and other attempts to clean the boards before use (including light sanding) I wasn't getting very far.

I eventually bought a set of new circuit boards from a more reputable seller but before cracking on with my light gun adaptors I thought I should try a more straightforward weekend project and I ended up building myself a RetroWiFiModem.

This is a device that looks like an old dial-up modem and though it does have an RS-232 serial port on the back to connect it to a computer it doesn't attach to a phone line but instead connects to a modern Wi-Fi network. You can send it Hayes-style AT commands and "dial out" to a domain name which will then open a Telnet (or raw socket) connection to the remote computer and allow you to exchange data. As long as your old computer has a terminal emulator on it you can use this to connect to and browse online services such as BBSes.

I had a lot of fun building this and setting this up – especially as I can confirm that the circuit went together extremely easily on my new prototyping circuit boards – and it reminded me that I'd seen a terminal emulator program for the TI-83 Plus calculator around 20 years ago by the name of Telnet 83 Plus. The documentation accompanying the program had lots of information in it about how to connect to a modem using the calculator's grey serial link cable which directly translates the calculator's link protocol to true 9600 baud RS-232, unlike the black cable which I owned which just uses the control lines to bit-bang the calculator's link protocol. As I never had the equipment for this the program only ever ended up being a curiosity to me, but having seen how well the RetroWiFiModem worked I thought it could be adapted for use on a calculator.

To do this I wrote a simple implementation of the calculator's link protocol in a class that inherited from the Arduino's Stream class. This is the same class that the Serial class inherits from, so having done that all I needed to do was a find-and-replace of Serial.* in the original source code with tilp.* and I had a version of the RetroWiFiModem that worked when connected to a calculator. As I also wanted this version to be a little more pocket-sized I designed it around the cheap ESP-01 or ESP-01S modules, which lacks the pins to drive the status LEDs on the original version so this ended up being a slightly more slimmed-down version of the project. It still has all the networking features, though, and the end result is the TIWiFiModem:

To interact with the modem I was using Telnet 83 Plus however I'd encountered a few bugs with this program, including incompatibility with newer TI-83 Plus calculators with slower display drivers (resulting in a scrambled image on the LCD), a lack of overflow checking on the receive buffer that would cause it to truncate long transfers and the inability to type certain keys in uppercase. Fortunately the source code was included so I dusted off my Z80 assembler and fixed these issues, along with shaving a few thousand bytes off the program size, improved compatibility with some VT100 sequences, a mode that automatically keeps the cursor within the view of the screen and local echo. These changes, along with the firmware for the modem, can be found on the TIWiFiModem Github page.

Video thumbnail for demonstration of TIWiFiModem on YouTube

If you'd like to see what the TIWiFiModem is all about before building one yourself, I put together a video demonstrating it which is embedded above.

Subscribe to an RSS feed that only contains items with the TIWiFiModem tag.

FirstLast RSSSearchBrowse by dateIndexTags