Quote from: roman.z on August 02, 2014, 06:28:49 PM

Quote from: Ente on August 02, 2014, 11:08:48 AM

I'm late to the party, but really like where this concept is heading to!

Quote from: casascius on January 09, 2013, 04:37:27 AM

If it were me, I would implement this as RS232 serial comms, and then try to go about seeing if someone wanted to write a generic audio-to-serial device driver that emulated a serial port at the kernel level. Then the separation of duties in the code is appropriate, and the audio overhead is totally optional.

Yes, I totally agree, a generic, modular solution would be sweet.
Both devices use a (virtual or physical) RS232 port, where users can decide what they put in between the two systems.

I would then not use an audio layer on top of that, but an optical:
- a green LED for sending data from online to offline, shining onto a phototransistor connected to the offline system
- a red LED for sending data from offline to online, shining onto a phototransistor connected to the online system

They flicker happily away, should be pretty fast too, and I immediately see when and how long they transmit data, and in what direction too!

Other users might prefer the audio link. Or a plain direct RS232 cable.

What do you guys think?

Ente

This sounds very interesting!

I think that given two sound cards with optical input/output (such as http://www.dx.com/p/external-5-1-channel-usb-2-0-sound-card-optical-audio-adapter-black-41289),
it may be possible to use the digital audio interface as a uni-directional data stream...

The single problem is the additional cost (if existing sound card has no such interfaces), and maybe potential security implication (if USB sound card is used).

Actually I had a much simpler way in mind:
a serial cable coming from both the online and offline computer, meeting in a transparent box. There, they have LEDs and phototransistors hooked up. Much like an optocoppler. Now the two computers can effectively speak to each other over RS-232. The difference is that I can visually see there is data communication, how much, how long, and in what direction (via different colored LEDs in both directions).

How Armory speaks to the onboard RS-232 port, or to a USB-to-RS232 adapter is just software. And exactly this dynamic, modular software layer I was proposing! :-)

Ente