Back in the early 1980’s, Acorn computers already supported a Local Area Network called ‘Econet’. This was mainly intended for school use, to share expensive peripherals in the classroom. There was no WiFi or LAN back in those days. I’d like to resurrect an ‘Econet’ infrastructure for my collection of machines.
Hardware
Ken Lowe designed an Econet HAT for the Raspberry Pi. It contains an Econet Bridge with integrated Econet module, Econet clock & termination. Besides connecting your physical (BBC, Archimedes etc.) or emulated (BeebEm) Acorn computers, it can even link multiple Econets together via the Internet!
I’ll be using a Raspberry Pi model 3A+ (WiFi only) with the Econet HAT.
Software
Chris Royle wrote the ‘PiEconetBridge’ software. It consists of a Linux kernel module plus supporting utilities to provide an Econet-to-AUN bridge. More information about this software can be found on the StarDot forum.
One of the main use cases is for file sharing between Acorn computers and modern Linux/macOS/Windows machines; just copy your files to the Econet share.
I installed PiEconetBridge v2.0 “High Performance Bridge” according to the documentation. When I connected an Acorn BBC-B with built-in Econet, the station number and clock seemed to be OK, but I got strange errors with text that looked like tokenized BASIC. Perhaps a hardware issue on the Beeb?
(to be continued …)
Update 2024-11-01: during the ABUG-NL meeting in October, we got Econet working on the Beeb - excellent!