Ser-USB Part 3

To use a  Ser-USB device on a QL obviously requires a connection with the serial port. After that the card or stick attached to the device needs formatting. The easy way to format uses the supplied Partition Manager task. This gives the option to initialise the device which is formatting and creating the root partition. After this has been accomplished subsequent partitions can be created simply through partition manager. So far QL Heaven has been playing about with making partitions and copying files to them and from them to get a feel for the system. Here are some screen shots of this happening. With the eye of faith you can see Qtrans (Dilwyn Jones program) displaying the contents of USB1_ and USB2_. 

The curvature of the image is down to the fact that this is a photograph of a CRT screen. The partitions can be quite large. No upper limit on partition size is mentioned in the manual but the practicalities of transferring files through the serial port should limit ambition. none the less it is possible to copy directories and then sub directories within the directory all to the USB device and then retrieve files.The question then is how large are directories on a QL root directory. There are no smsq/e functions to return this as far as QL Heaven is aware. So as there was a need here is QL Heavens SBASIC directory sizing program. The directory SBASIC containing all the _bas files has just been sized at 4MB and 486 files.