Espruino as Minitel «brain».
One of my hobbies is to give functionalty to obsolete things. One of the completely obsolete things, but beautiful as retro design is the different france telecom’s minitel models.
I have around 4 variants and I want to use one of the olders to give some computation options.
The Minitel 1 from Alcatel. Fully functional and and ready to work, but on 2020 there is no option for this terminal to connect to the old servers not even the phone connector is a common RJ11.
This minitel model have a serial port that can be used to transfer data with the same protocol and with the same speed as with the phone line.
For the other side connection I use a espruino wifi a very small piece of hardware really powerful and easy to work with similar to arduino in concept but with javascript.
 | 1.Rx 2.Ground 3.Tx 4.Pt (transmission signal) 5.Power (on some models) |
In the espruino side the serial uses pins B7, B6 and GND Voltages are the same.
| Espruino Wifi | Minitel |
|---|---|
| B7 (RX) | 3 (TX) |
| B6 (TX) | 1 (RX) |
| GND | 2 (GND) |
The next script to connect to the minitel.
Serial1.setup(1200, {
tx:B6,
rx:B7,
bytesize:7,
parity:"e",
errors:true
});And as the minitel keyboard is not adapter to write code like javascript the default espruino javascript console is redirected to USB:
E.on('init', function() {
USB.setConsole();
});At this moment the problem is software only:
I use this links to get information about the protocol.
http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/
https://github.com/geisterkatze/Minitel
I decided to design something like the text mode GUI applications on DOS and add some mini applications to it like Clock / Game or a simple settings pannel for the wifi configuration.
Also i’m developing some kind of Basic similar interpreter more adapted to the minitel’s keyboard. Huh an interpreted basic inside interpreted javascript.
