[Nathanial Hendler]’s Apple2Fool expansion card for the Apple II family of personal computers is a nifty mix of modern day and classic, and delivers a clever indicates of enabling the host laptop to (indirectly) entry the world-wide-web about WiFi when retaining things basic from the host computer’s viewpoint.

It does this by embedding an ESP32 module and a dual-port RAM chip onto an growth card. The Apple2Idiot, when put in into a host equipment, offers as a memory site which the host device can accessibility. The ESP32 then takes treatment of all the WiFi communications and jobs demanding web accessibility, and the host personal computer directs these tasks (and reads their output) through PEEK and POKE commands.

This signifies that there are two items of computer software for any given job: one functioning on the ESP32 doing the actual do the job, and one operating on the Apple II that communicates with the ESP32 on the card by examining and writing to memory. It is a easy method, and one that [Nathanial] thinks is effective quite very well for specific tasks.

Instance packages contain things like scanning and choosing a WiFi community, fetching weather facts, and sending a message to Slack. Earning new apps does mean owning to produce program on two ends, but the simplicity of the procedure also suggests versatility, since nearly anything the ESP32 does can have its complexity abstracted absent by the time its knowledge is introduced to the host device. Not that the Apple II is incapable of dealing with the modern-day world wide web extra immediately we’ve viewed a primary Apple II net server published in Fundamental.