I loved my BeBox, but what would be the modern equivalent of the GeekPort? I've been using esp32/nRF52/etc boards for uart/spi/i2c/i2s/pwm-type work... it feels like hardware hacking on a desktop is a lost art.
I loved my BeBox, but what would be the modern equivalent of the GeekPort? I've been using esp32/nRF52/etc boards for uart/spi/i2c/i2s/pwm-type work... it feels like hardware hacking on a desktop is a lost art.
Your BeBox case was lovingly spray painted in a conference room with inadequate ventilation by us at Be at corporate HQ in Menlo Park. Each one was lovingly assembled by the actual people who designed the hardware and wrote the code.
Still got my BeBox, boot it up every year just to make sure its still okay. I have wondered about that paint job over the years ..
The closest modern thing to it is probably the Raspberry Pi GPIO header.
The old school way to do I/O on desktop was via the parallel port, which I imagine would still work if you get a PCIe parallel port card. For a more modern way, the FT232H chip supports UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG and raw GPIO over USB, and there are break-out boards available.
I was going to say this as well the GeekPort was a parallel port. I always thought it was marketed that way is that Macs didn’t have a parallel port. Having a parallel port would make the spec sheet seem regressive. I believe serial ports were always faster than parallel ports. I bought a BeBox at the time.
The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.
This is still an on-going thing for the LinuxCNC project (which mostly follows Mach3 in using a Parallel port interface to drive a CNC controller).
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