FujiNet 8-bit computer network adapter

As I expected, the start of the year did it's usual - I had a lovely time over xmas/new year period doing fun things in my personal time and then a return to work and the big blue dominant shadow of work/work overshadowed and eclipsed everything. TBF though I could just ignore it and carry on as before, however, I needed to wrestle back control of my current project as it was being overrun by people intent on a downward spiral of destruction and I couldn't have that - I have worked too bl00dy hard for the past 3-years to allow it to all collapse and die just because they were not mentally capable of changing into a Research & Development mindset. Alas, something has to give and for me that is/was my time and effort. I am glad to say, I and the project are back on track and heading into a positive trajectory.

I digress.

Whilst my return to Captain-ship and alleviation of mutiny was squashed, I did take the plung and order myself a FUJINET device for the 8-bit Atari 800 XL. I did take about 4-5 weeks, so I am glad I got in early and it arrived just at the right time (philosophical discussion to ensure about whether the above scenario was needed in order for me to consume the time until it arrived, but y'know, we'll never know the alternatives unless we can find a way to visualise the multi-verses). Apparently the really nice chap at 8Bit-Tronics was making a last batch of these devices - they ARE open-source so you can make one from scratch yourself - so I ordered one and it arrived and I placed it on the "to get around to desk". I was going to wait until the end of the month to take a look, but I think I'll be focusing on giving myself an MOT, doing maintenance on the motorhome, all the vehicles and getting the custom car out ready for regular usage this year.... so may not have time for "playing".

What can I say about this device? Well.... https://fujinet.online/

What sets FujiNet apart from other WiFi devices is the new Network Device (the N Device). The N device allows vintage computers that do not have enough processing power to handle TCP/IP connections talk to the modern internet over WiFi. Virtual adapters have been created for many protocols including: TCP, UDP, HTTP, FTP, TNFS, HTTPS (SSL/TLS), SSH, TELNET, WebDAV and JSON parser.

The FujiNet project is 100% completely open source, software and hardware. All code and hardware designs are available on our Github. Anyone is welcome to join us and add support for any system they want. We are more than willing to help where we can. The best way to get in touch with us is on our Discord server.

Well.... WHAT CAN I DO WITH IT? is a question you will likley ask yourself - well, CLICK THIS LINK HERE and go read all about it yourself.

Whilst I had some similar makeshift devices like this for the old Amstrad CPC464 they were a bit flaky (and were based around the ESP8266) they didn't quite have the extent of what you can do with this device - if you *sigh* really wanted to, you can jump on the 'idiot-wagon' and make an API call from ATARI BASIC and make calls to chatGPT if you really want to "pretend" your Atari 800XL is "HAL 9000" from 2001 and that you've "invented the usage of AI" *sigh* - yes, I sigh a lot because it is 'not' AI and it is not smart, it is just a fancy puker of (mis)information that looks really useful until you scrape away the puke and see that it's a nice "demo" - come back in 4years when it's grown into something useful (my personal opinion of chatGPT - and I do actually know how to code that tech from the ground up - I tip my hat to the coders of the chat style coding output interface, but the 'ML' under the bonnet and the army of humans needed to do the RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) is all very archaic.

What IS 21st century and "wow!" is getting a 1979/81 ATARI 800 XL connected to modern day hardware and software and having glorious 8-bit PIXEL graphics being rendered to show things like weather reports or anything else that can be fetched at the end of a network API call and then turned into graphics or text. Now, that is awesome.

What to know where the ISS is and who is in space right now?

Okay - I tease, but add VOICE SPEECH SYNTHESIS via BASIC to the ATARI 800 XL and then have a conversation with your 1970/80s ATARI and get it to be your front-end interface as a CHATBOT:

https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-platformio/wiki/Using-SAM-%28Voice-Synthesizer%29

maybe we can make it into "HAL 9000" after all :-)

Right, I need to go setup an SD-Card and get mine up and running.... my photos/videos to follow.

UPDATE:

okay, so the following photo's / images came first and then the chin-scratching came afterwards, but I've posted this the wrong way around - of course. I was pondering... I wonder if I can have a SLACK client running on the Atari 800 XL?

Well, this is available and so is this... so maybe I'll find some time this coming week to have a little play - after setting up C65 in Linux to do cross-compiling of the Atari C code first - that should be "fun".