|
Micellaneous & Ongoing Projects
EZIO with Internet
Related Links
Kinetics Facility
Display Case
|
|
Adding Internet Capability to an EZIO board
 The Lantronix XPort ethernet-to-serial device seems to be a good companion device to the NIQ EZIO
interface board. [This is not a recommeded user mod.] The EZIO takes a
very simple set of commands over an RS-232 link and either outputs
digital control signals or returns a value representing an analog or
digital value present at its input pins. The data flowing into and out
of the big PIC chip inthe middle of the board id converted from normal
logic level signals of +5 volts and ground, to RS232 levels of -12 and
+12 volts by a MAX232 chip. The MAX chip has a few companion
components, the little blue capacitors, which it requires to function.
To convert the PIC chip to internet data I/O, I removed the MAX232 chip
and its little blue friends, and substituted the XPort device. When you
open a socket to the XPort from a remote computer, the XPort behaves as
a server and completes the connection. After the connection is
completed, data from the ethernet cable passes to the PIC chip as
though it was a serial cable. I made a program in Processing which does
the socket stuff for the purpose of reading a pot on the modified EZIO
board in order to control a sort of animation of JPEGS on the remote
client computer (the XPort is the server, remember). When you mouse
down in the image, an LED turns on on the EZIO end of the connection.
The Processing program will not run as an applet because it would be
required to open a connection to an IP address other than the one from
which the applet was served, which is not legal for applets to do.
Therefore the Processing folder containing the source code and the JPEG
images has to be on the client computer.
The connection is not entirely stable and sometimes the network hangs
really hard. I need to find out why this happens.
The Processing program is here. The tar file is for downloading.
|