A complete Internet web server built into an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack | Hacker News Reader

A complete Internet web server built into an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack

inventables.com

97 pointstzm34 comments

Off topic-ish:

Is inventables actually just linkbait garbage which happens to also sell things? They never list the vendor of their products, the prices are always high (often twice that of retail), and they never have any technical details or volume pricing.

Oh, you're interested in this Sorghum based "Non-Toxic Decorative Wood Composite?" [1] Well, you can buy a 4"x3" sample for $15 but they won't tell you who makes it (Kieri USA [2] does) or the cost for boards.

The manufacturer is usually only a Google search away, and I'm willing to pay a premium for a small sample, but I'm not going to order even samples unless I can get more detailed information. Does Inventables actually serve any purpose other than to act as linkbait for a bunch of interesting products?

[1] http://www.inventables.com/technologies/non-toxic-decorative... [2] http://www.kireiusa.com

Yes, basically. Its a storefront for someone who sells at 100% markup stuff you can get elsewhere.

Inventables a University of Illinois startup.

If you play with several dozen of their materials, you will get several product ideas, some olf which may even have markets!

I think they are trying to provide value through all the normal ways an online reseller would, with a bent for the entrepeneurial inventer market.

At least that'd the impression that I get. For large quantities I would hazard the guess that no party misses out on the pie.

OK, it’s got an Ethernet jack and a Web server on one end. What’s on the other end? If I were designing a clothes dryer or coffee machine and wanted to Internet-enable it, how would I hook up the signals from the control panel to the jack? Is there some standard bus or serial protocol that appliance manufacturers use for their onboard computers?

It's a manufacturer-specific serial protocol--NOT standard. You can find the command reference here: http://www.lantronix.com/pdf/XPort-Pro_CR.pdf

But, if you're really interested in internet-enabling a new product, you'd likely be better off selecting a microcontroller with built-in Ethernet (or an Arduino with Ethernet shield, if prototyping). In my experience, products like the XPort were better for manufacturers looking to internet-enable a legacy device with a free serial port.

Hmm. $200.

You can get an Arduino with an ethernet shield for about $75-80.

This does not appear to have any detailed tech specs on the linked page,detail on customisability/programmability or on the interconnects offered. But even if we allow it some leniency on that I figure an Arduino is still the no brainer choice :)

It looks like a Lantronix (http://lantronix.com) XPort, which can be had for much less than $200 from various electronics suppliers. For example, I just found the XP1001000-03R variant for $51 (qty. 1) at Arrow.

As far as the product being designed for hobbyists - hmm - it doesn't really have that feel to it. I think the intended market is more along the lines of one-off or low production volume industrial control hardware, test equipment, etc. One use I've seen documented was as an out-of-band control channel on a very high end FPGA board.

A classmate of mine (Junior-level EE) used the Lantronix with an ATmega 8-bit controller. Lantronix sent him some Java, and the thing just worked.

i can not recommend this unfortunately, as the devkit was far from easy to use. i could not get any scripting language running on it and generally the documentation was really sparse. that was 1 year ago.but if you are an ulinux pro it is certainly a good choice!

Or you can get just the module, I know the Digi ConnectME is about 50$ for a 75mhz/8mb ram, runs linux and has an eclipse based IDE. Same company that makes XBee modules too.

True, but this appears to be much smaller than an Arduino.

I assumed this was intended as a posting for home hackers to have a go at internet enabling their devices; in which case I think the size consideration isn't much of an issue.

If we're talking consumer product design, i.e. mass produced internet enabled fridges, sure this is not a bad idea :)

But for a home hacker the Arduino is the way forward :)

Arduino is considerably more expensive, sizable, and complicated than is really needed for a finished home hacker project. Additionally, size does matter (sorry :) when you're trying to fit a piece of electronics into your home in an unobtrusive way.

You don't need a full Arduino to wirelessly enable (802.15.4+ZigBee or 6LoWPAN!) a simple device. You just need the MCU (and the tiny family may be sufficient - $2-5) and the wireless hardware (eg, xbee, or one of Atmel's new combined atmega+802.15.4 chipsets if you can deal with the antenna requirements - $8 - $30), an optional crystal oscillator (<$1), and -- if necessary -- a power source (eg, some batteries).

As for commercial applications -- I'd expect them to use wireless, and my money is on either straight WiFi (especially for something as large as a fridge), or 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN (especially for smaller, low-power devices).

That's all true, but for _me_, the Arduino is invaluable for making it easy to go through the many iterations of hardware prototype and software I need before I decide on the final form (or, more commonly, give up on it as not-as-good-an-idea-as-I-first-thought).

If/when I get to a stage where I think I've got a "version 1.0", I'll sometimes (if space really is an issue - in my projects that's usually because I'm trying to fit it inside a small RC plane) reduce it to a 168 or 328 in a minimal-external-component configuration. Often though, an Arduino mini (or even a full sized Arduino) is perfectly fine.

If I ever thought I was going to build dozens or hundreds of something I'd designed, the ~$30 for an Arduino Mini might become an issue, but for my style of homebuilt projects the money spent on a Mini is often a good tradeoff between my money and my time.

Arduino is an OK development board, but it does constrain your final deployment choices.

I use Atmel's STK600 development platform for the same purpose; the STK600 is their modern development board and supports just about every MCU available via (relatively) cheap routing/socket cards. They've got a have a programmable clock generator, adjustable VCC, switches/LEDs/etc, as well as support for ISP programming such that I can burn bootloaders, and high voltage programming if I happen to screw that up.

I can quickly iterate on a design while using an STK600 to prototype, and I'm not constrained by Arduino's hardware/bootloader/MCU requirements, especially in relation to clock speed and power consumption -- something that I would assume matters a lot on RC planes.

Plus, since the STK600 supports the full line of Atmel microcontrollers, you can specialize for the task at hand, be it USB or wireless.

I'll admit that the nice thing about the Arduino Mini for deployment is that it's a very accessible (and small sized) package; off the shelf, most people won't want to deal with SMT and would have a hard time building something as small.

Certainly not new, I know digi.com sells a lot of these things since at least 2008. Look for the Digi Connect products. The interfaces on the other side can be as simple as RS-232.

They've been on the market for a lot longer than that, actually. But it looks like some incremental improvements have been made over the years, quite interesting really.

http://www.digi.com/products/wireless-wired-embedded-solutio...

http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-s...

I remember working with several of the Parallax PINK modules back in the day as well. http://www.parallax.com/Store/Accessories/CommunicationRF/ta...

If memory serves me correctly, some peers at my university had wrote a web interface to control the lights on the Christmas Tree in the commons area.

That appears to be a Lantronics XPORT, been using them for over 7 years. Interesting they are selling them for over 200 we buy them for 70 each, Now that's markup....

Yeah, looks like an XPort. Maybe this is the evaluation kit, which comes with the carrier board for ~$150-200. It's been a while since I used one (probably 7 years ago), but the serial interface was rather limited. To develop firmware for the XPort itself, you needed an SDK only available under NDA for customers they were willing to support (we were such a customer and the SDK was reasonably usable). It was a cool idea & a great way to Ethernet-enable serial devices, but nowadays something like the Arduino with Ethernet shield is probably more accessible.

I wish someone would design a firewall that is just an RJ-45 jack with a few dip switches to open/close commonly needed ports, the rest closed by default.

There's was a company who tried this kind of thing: Selling a wireless card which embedded a linux powered firewall:

http://www.yoggie.com/New_Yoggie/Welcome.html http://www.yoggie-gatekeeper.co.uk/

I don't know but it seems they failed a funding round.

The "Killer Nic" is semi-sucessful in the gaming arena:

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/killer-nic-m1/

It basically is linux on a NIC card that does packet reordering for lower latency, with varying degrees of success depending the situation.

They're also moving into wireless:

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/bigfoot-networks-killer-wirel...

I'd think that the bandwidth on an embedded device like this is too low for enterprise use -- it would be a network bottleneck. You'd have to have a much higher clock rate than most small devices can achieve to get full 10/100/1000 bandwidth, so the market would be pretty small.

I wonder - for between a typical sub 10Mbit ADSL connection and the rest of a home/small business network? I suspect there's a _lot_ of sub 10 Mbit (never mind 100 or 1000Mbit) internet connections where an "inline firewall" ethernet doohicky wouldn't need too much cpu horsepower...

Interesting product. Doing a quick google search I have seen prices under $100. Unfortunately, it looks like it only has serial out.

I have been looking for a small single board linux computer (preferably open source) to use as a gateway and/or web server for embedded projects. I would like something in between an Arduino and Beagleboard.

Arduino is great for running simple web servers, but it would be nice to have a Linux OS with some familiar tools to be able to build more complex web apps. Products like the Beagleboard fill this need, but they are complex and expensive if you decide to bundle it with your product.

If you don't mind external hosting you can always send your data to the cloud, but I like the simplicity of a self contained product.

The closest I have found to these requirement is at Dangerous Prototypes (sill in development).

  Web Platform v2
  - 210MHz ARM926             - 2x SPI
  - Hopefully 2 layers!       - Linux 
  - 4x USART                  - 2x 10 bit a/d
  - ethernet                  - < $100?

Forum: http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&...

Wiki: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Robert:_AT91SAM9260_Linu...

Try a SheevaPlug. Its a little ARM with a full-on debian install. About $80.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

Or if you're into x86 try something from pcEngines. A bit more expensive, but no crosscompiler required to build packages on your desktop.

http://www.pcengines.ch/

Ahh yes. I forgot to mention that. Plug computers seem like the best option right now. Thanks.

I sure hope its IPv6 if everyone is going to start putting web servers into their socks.

That's not RJ45, it's properly called 8P8C.

This is one of the smaller devices like this I've seen. I am really curious about the photographic opportunities that could be open with such a device. Footage could be directly streamed online via ethernet cable connected directly to the camera...

could this be used the same way those wall outlet/pluggable web connected computers were for hacking networks? i.e. you replace someone's existing ethernet wall jack with this one w/a server in it, and they would NEVER find your machine piggy backing off their internal network.

does it means that interface jacks have not advanced even a bit in the last few decades??

If you're referring to the physical jack, then, essentially, no. They were standardised in the 1970s, and the form factor hasn't changed at all, while electronic parts have become much much smaller over the same time frame.

There may have been advances within the connector itself, to improve the signal-carrying properties of the internal connections, but the overall design of the connector is basically unchanged.

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