JeeLabs Café

I'm sorry to hear that Folie v2 is working so badly under Windows.

There is some trickery in Folie v2 which might be causing this, but I have no experience with Win10 and unfortunately very limited ways to figure this out. It's good to know that v1 is doing better, but there really are quite a number of differences - hard to explain what's going on. Well, for me anyway.

Would it be an option to set up a Linux box, i.e. RasPi, Odroid, CHIP, or similar?
They can be configured to run ser2net, which Folie can then drive over a net socket.
I'll be happy to dive in deeper and document that in a future weblog post.

Yes, I think I will setup a RasPi, shouldn't be too complicated.

Another workaround for Windows is to use a simple ESP-01 breakout-board with the ESP-Link firmware installed and configured as a simple bridge. For me line-handling then is very fast but there are still some instabilities in the communication.

Regarding Windows, it should be a great pity if Windows users are excluded. On the other hand, I'm afraid i'm the only Windows user in this Mac/Linux community. Somehow I have made a wrong decision decades ago.

I will be travelling coming days but will dive deeper into this next week. Will keep you posted.

I will admit to being a Windows user for many many years, I am comfortable with Win7 and have a couple of Win10 devices, a stick and a tablet.

Although I have owned Macbooks for a few years too I only made the jump to make Macbook Pro my day to day laptop a few months ago. I now admit to many wasted years in the Windows world. While expensive the engineering behind the Mac product appears to be done right and in real depth. It takes a week or two to get into the Mac groove but the trackpad is so intuitive and streets ahead of any Windows hardware I have ever used. Using an Apple trackpad on a Windows machine really does strike home how primitive the internals of Windows are in this area particularly.

I think that using RasPi compliments whichever laptop you device choose to use.

If you don't currently own RasPi you might consider Odroid instead.

@JohnO. Yes, maybe I should consider to switch to Mac at the end of my own life-cycle. Anyway, I have some RasPi's lying around and meanwhile enough (Linux)-experience too setup a ser2net.

Meanwhile I have a setup on a Linux box (RasPi), running Folie2 with a Blue Pill/SerPlus flashing a Jeenode Zero and can confirm it works great!! So it's a good workaround for Windows users.

Meanwhile the root cause of slow communication is solved. jcw will update the folie binary in github soon.

I've just been using the latest release of folie (V2.10) on windows 7 and it is all working great until I run a defined word at which point the usb communication drops out. I then have to exit the command window, disconnect/reconnect usb cable and start again. Sending files and interacting with mecrisp works fine.
It seems to only be a problem with windows as I don't see the same issue under linux.
Running a word as simple as

: toggle-led begin led iox! 250 ms key? until ;

will cause it to drop out.
Anyone else experienced the same thing?

Great work with all of this btw. I'm loving the added functionality in folie V.2
Cheers.

Yes, there are still several odd behaviours on Windows and Linux.
I tend to miss such issues because I use MacOS, where things appear to be working fine.

It would help if you could submit an new issue on GitHub, because I still don't have enough information to understand what's going on. So at this point, the only way forward is to document more cases and collect more info ...

FWIW, I've set up an alternative "mini-folie" which completely reworks the way Folie interacts with Mecrisp.
See issue 46 on GitHub, at https://github.com/jeelabs/folie/issues/46 - would appreciate help to try and improve things.