Parsing Hayes modem AT commands, part 1

2014-03-03: Latest source code is on GitHub.

Several of my Arduino plans involve the old 1980’s Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo). I have previously discussed plans to use modern USB mice, joysticks and keyboards with this old home computer, as well as going the other way and allowing old CoCo joysticks to be used on modern PCs.

That seemed like an easy first step, and one I hope to find time for some time before I retire. I haven’t had time to touch any of this for awhile. That, however, does not stop me from planning even more projects.

There is an Arduino Ethernet shield currently available for $17.99 from Sainsmart in China. They ship free to the USA, but it takes awhile. For a bit more, you can buy it from Amazon and have it shipped 2nd day via Amazon Prime.

These shields provide an Ethernet port for the Arduino, and library code is provided to do basic things such as make a TCP socket connection. Samples exist showing how to go retrieve a web page, FTP put/get a file, or even serve up web content so you can create an HTML interface to interact with the device. With the Arduino doing the physical interfacing to the wire, and heavy lifting of the TCP/UDP/IP protocol stack, this might be an easy way to bring internet connectivity to the CoCo.

Over a decade ago at the 2001 Chicago CoCoFEST! convention, Minnesota-based Cloud-9 Tech announced plans for the “Superboard” hardware add-on. It would be a secondary I/O board that would connect inside a CoCo case and bring all kinds of hardware add ons, such as a hard disk interface. The product has yet to be completed, but many spinoff items have been released during development.

One of the proposed features of the Superboard was the addition of an iChip from ConnectOne. This chip implemented TCP/IP as well as common internet protocols like FTP, Telnet and mail. Small devices could talk to the chip via serial (like talking to a modem) and send commands, then the chip would go do the actual work via a dialup ISP or ethernet link. I thought this was the killer feature, and started referring to this project as the “Internet CoCo.”

I even looked in to making an RS232 adapter that would have an iChip in it, so you could plug a cable from an RS232 pak on the CoCo to this adapter, then to a modem and get all the features that way. But, at the time, I didn’t have the money to invest in the ConnectOne reference platform (a modem with iChip built in) to work on it.

Well, today the iChip is still made and only cost $25 in single unit quantities. I still think this adapter would be a great idea, but perhaps there is another way…

It would be relatively trivial to write Arduino code that would do this. A CoCo (or any device with RS232) could send commands to the device to establish network connections and then the data could be passed back as serial data. The only tricky bit would be allowing multiple socket connections (FTP, for instance, uses two at a time). For that, some form of serial multiplexing (using one serial line with a protocol on it to act as multiple lines) could be used.

Side Note: There is an absolutely amazing thing called DriveWire created by a former coworker of mine, Boisy Pitre. He created a serial protocol to allow a PC to host disk files for a CoCo via the bitbanger serial port. Over the years, the protocol has evolved and gained many features well beyond virtual disks. It’s truly amazing.

Well, today, the DriveWire server already implements much of what I am talking about doing, including multiplexing serial ports so a CoCo, connected by a single serial cable at 115Kbaud, can have multiple virtual serial ports, MIDI ports, disks, hard drives, etc. DriveWire even runs on a $25 Raspberry Pi, so one could do this without even needing a full PC nearby…

…but that won’t stop me from learning and experimenting. In fact, after I started my current job almost a year ago, I got access to a Raspberry Pi which I hooked up recently for the first time. I expect whatever I develop for Arduino I will also port to Raspberry Pi. Perhaps I can even make the Arduino code speak some of the DW protocol for virtual serial ports and such.

We shall see.

But I digress.

The real focus of this posting is to share my code for a Hayes modem “AT” command parser. In olden days of dial up modems, there were certain “smart” modems that could dial the phone on their very own. Amazing. On power up, these modems were in “command mode” and you could type commands to them like “ATDT 555-1212”. This mean “(At)tention. (D)ial using (T)ouch tone. 555-1212”. “ATH” was the hang up command. Various other commands existed for things like telling the modem if it should auto-answer the phone after a certain amount of rings, or specify how fast the touch tone dialing should be.

The “AT” command set was created by the Hayes Modem company, and other manufactures had their own system for interacting with their modems, but eventually the Hayes command set won out and became a standard. (There’s a great Wikipedia article on this.)

Since the iChip (and pretty much everything else, including modern cell phone modems) makes use of a Hayes-style command set, I thought I would implement something similar myself.

So, coming up soon, I will share code that handles the basics of this, and then will start piecing things together to interface it to the Arduino Ethernet port so you could do something like “ATDI 127.0.0.1:80″ (Attention, dial over the internet to IP address 127.0.0.1 port 80”.

Sounds fun. If I can find the time.

One thought on “Parsing Hayes modem AT commands, part 1

  1. Pingback: Parsing Hayes modem AT commands, part 2 | Sub-Etha Software

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