Commander X16

Here are some notes starting cold with the networking card. It was not nearly as painful as I was expecting, and I even had to update the firmware. Thanks to the folks on Discord for help.

• purchased the card (archived for posterity)
• put it in the board
• dowloaded the latest ROMTERM.PRG found on the X16 Discord (from early June 2024, not linking here so ask around?)
• turned on X16, ran ROMTERM.PRG
• selected default settings (wifi "UART" already was already selected)

This brought me into the version of Zimodem that came with the card. I proceeded, then:

• to configure the wifi I typed,

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  at+config

• typed in, "host" - local machine name, just set it to "x16"
• typed in, "wifi" - scans local wifi APs, select the one you want and put in the password
• typed in, "quit" - prompts to save and quit

Once back to the main zimodem terminal, I tried connected to a couple of addresses; but it was clear there was a problem with the way it was displaying (more on that in a second); typed in the following commands:

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  atd"vert.synchro.net"

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  atd"213.136.8.188"

This worked, but it was clear I needed to update the firmware on my network card. Based on:

• I downloaded the update ZIP from Texelec, here
• unzip'd it and followed the instructions in the text file

Notes on the update:

• running on Windows 10
• I tried the "./Update.bat" in Powershell, but the device could not be found initially
• I did the "hold BOOT" thing to put it in update mode, that may have helped but the main issue was no driver was present
• I had to install the driver CP210x Universal Windows Driver here
• unzip'd it, found the device in the Windows "Device Manager" and went through "properties" to "update driver" - most may be familiar with this process
• ended up putting the device on "COM3" for me
• ran "./Update.bat" in Powershell, and it worked just fine

I then put it back in the x16, and reran "at+config" via "ROMTERM.PRG" to connect to wifi.

After that it all worked. The main card site has links to different BBSes and other things to play around with.

I finally got my network connection working. I looked at the command "adt"213.136.8.188" and it looked somehow wrong to me. On the Texelec website for the ESP32 network card, they use the "atd" command. So I tried that and my network card connected to that BBS.

Yayyyyy!

Gerry

Thank you I submitted a correction that had to be moderator approved.