Wednesday, January 11, 2006

NET-IOM board (continued)

As mentioned earlier this week I have been hugely impressed with this network remote control card and have spent the last couple of days thinking about applications for our customers.

Setup is very easy - 12v DC and a network connection. I also got the prototyping kit which has a relay board and a bunch of LEDs you can test with - CPC have them on special at the moment (see here).
Initial thoughts are that is really seems to do what it said it would - I'll have to get another to test the VTR control (as I'm still not sure you can reduce the latency enough - if you're having to packetise a serial stream that should be co-incident with a video reference and them pass it over a TCP network). Anyhow - the webserver side of the board works well and it can ping me an email when events happen. You can see from the screen-shot that the counter is easy to configure as well.
The only area where the documentation is unclear is that the "programming" jumper (J42 on this board) not only allows the board to receive config data over the serial port but it also disables the ethernet connection - makes sense I suppose - that "webserver on a chip" PICT device you can see in the centre probably can't do config changes while serving up over the network - but they should have mentioned that in the documentation.
Another feature that I'm sure has application is that the board will watch a serial stream and when you get to a pre-defined number of characters (1024 bytes is the default) it will stick them into an email and send it to you! Fantastic - I imagine there are many applications where you want to trap an event and see what log data was generated at the time - I have to find applications for this!
For you edification the manual is here.

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