A summary and update draws nigh! (thanks
@stepleton for the suggestion/reminder that a catch-up would be a good idea.) The story so far...
This is AirTalk. AirTalk is a dongle that extends a LocalTalk (or PhoneNet, or equivalent) network over WiFi.
It's basically plug and play: you tell it what WiFi network to connect to through the Chooser, and then you just go. All the AirTalk dongles on the same WiFi network can see each other and all look like they're on the same LocalTalk network, and so everything plugged into the LocalTalk port of those dongles can see each other as if the dongles were joined together with LocalTalk cables.
(this is the old icon; the new AirTalk icon, by @LaPorta, is prettier, but I didn't have a screenshot handy)
It requires no software on the Mac or LocalTalk device to
use it, the Chooser extension only sets it up, so it will work with things like printers or routers as well as with Macs.
You can also network with (at time of writing) the beta of Mini vMac, though I'm sure this code will make it into production sooner or later. (Though this has a few caveats, mostly around speed).
It has a serial port, where you can either plug in a printer cable to a single LocalTalk device (Mac, printer, router, whathaveyou) or plug a LocalTalk or PhoneNet box in to add it to the end of a whole LocalTalk network. It can either get its power from Micro USB or from an ADB passthrough.
AirTalk is not intended to be a highly tweakable or mysterious tool for network nerds or software engineers, but as user friendly and plug and play as I can make it. The AirTalk firmware is currently open source, and the hardware will be as soon as I get around to making the design available. It's not currently available, but for inertia reasons, rather than ideological ones.
Any testers who wish to weigh in with their experiences would be welcome—positive or negative, it's important people get a true impression of this.
So much for the sales bumf, what're the downsides?
You obviously lose some speed compared to "wired" LocalTalk. How fast it is depends on a lot of things. but all my testers managed to get it to work at at least half wired LocalTalk speed, and most significantly more. I get about 90% of wired LocalTalk speed, but I obssessed over building my WiFi network.
WiFi limitations: Decent speeds require decent WiFi signal strength. AirTalk does not do 5GHz WiFi, only 2.4GHz. It does not support WEP or WPA Enterprise, because the first is unsafe and the latter suggests you're plugging this into a corporate network which sounds like a bad idea. It supports WPA(2) Personal, and while it will connect to unencrypted networks, this is not a supported configuration, and you shouldn't do it unless you have absolutely no other choice. Your WiFi needs to be handing out IP addresses over DHCP—if you haven't deliberately turned this off it probably is—and it needs to be able to pass multicast. Nearly all modern WiFi does.
AirTalk is not a LocalTalk to EtherTalk bridge. If you have more modern OS 9 Macs with AirPort cards on the same WiFi network as AirTalk machines, they will not be able to see each other. There are good reasons for this, unfortunately.
AirTalk is not a generic serial/RS232 extender. If, for example, you have a non-LocalTalk printer, you can't stick two AirTalks between the printer and the computer and expect it to work. There are plenty of options for this already, I believe. AirTalk is a wireless networking dongle.
AirTalk is
not a modem emulator. It will not allow you to connect to, say, an IP network using emulated PPP. It
will, however, let you connect to an IP network with MacIP (using something like
@mactjaap's MacIP stuff or Apple IP Gateway) at LocalTalk speeds, which is probably faster.
If you only get one AirTalk, you will be basically limited to networking with Mini vMac at this point.
AirTalk dongles are £23 each. I'm going to start contacting people who have expressed interest in this thread (or otherwise) this week. I'm going to get them to people in the order they contacted me as much as possible. Please bear with me—this isn't a commercial operation, and I'm unused to running product logistics.
I think this is probably all that people need to know about the current state of the project!
edit:
If you’re looking for distribution partner in Australia let me know!
Thanks! I'm going to slightly rate limit the units I send out to start with simply so that if there are tech support issues, they're spread over a longer period. It's hard to write an FAQ until one knows what the Qs that are A-ed F are.
But after that's done and I upload the hardware designs, it'd be great if people wanted to get some made up in other countries to save on shipping and tax and so forth. The only bits of the hardware that aren't able to be assembled by the JLCPCB SMT assembly service are the mini-DINs and the PIC which is socketed, so really the only reason they need to come via me
at all is because of the aforesaid rate-limiting.