I've used one of these before. They are useful for attaching serial devices to an Ethernet network. It's a lot cheaper and easier than trying to put a PC with enough serial ports near every device you need to talk to. The ones I worked with were part of a radio modem sold by MaxStream, now part of Digi International.
That is essentially what these are. The default Lantronix firmware allows you to connect to the device on a specific TCP port and talk to the serial device on the other side. You configure them over HTTP or Telnet.
I use microcontrollers for prototyping and proof-of-concept work. Often I combine multiple devices into a system that I can control from a PC. It's been my experience that dropping in a something-to-serial converter is 100x easier than trying to install and understand a communication protocol "stack," even if the code and documentation is supplied by the chip vendor.
I tend to use little USB-to-serial breakout boards, but I'd do the same with RJ45 if I needed that interface.
Once something of mine is ready to commercialize, it gets handed over to professional developers who tend to prefer the built-in firmware based approach, but they end up spending a lot of time debugging those interfaces.
The arduino yun [1] combines an linux-based SoC with a microcontroller on a single board. So you can have both, networking and applications in practically any language, and an internal interface to a microcontroller.
For only accessing a rs232 serial port over ethernet, there are easier solutions. But if you need multiple of such ports, sensor access, etc. its quite a nice combination.
I've had good success with the NXP LPC178x series. Cortex M3 with onboard Flash and SRAM. Ethernet is onboard and easy to attach with a simple PHY, also works well with extenral SDRAM and expanded Flash.
yeah I also used that a while ago, but I don't think I can fit an ethernet client for Robotic Operating System on it. Doesn't appear straight forward anyway:-
I immediately imagined adding web UIs, or simply network APIs, to various "dumb" hardware. Attach it to a ADC/DAC and suddenly a lot of things become computer controllable. It's small enough to stick it on most electronic device boards without major changes.
Yeah these sort of "look at how small this fully functional computer is" pieces always make me wonder if they have a real world appeal or if they're more a proof-of-concept or tech demo to pull people's attention to the company's other products.
this would be fantastic for corporate espionage, snap one into an unused to drop somewhere and you have a beachhead inside the network. Combine it with a Micro SD card you have a great way to exfiltrate data via weekly/monthly data drops, without setting off external firewalls.
I didn't see PoE on this device, you need to supply 3.3VDC to make it run. So do you want to attach a wall wart? I don't think it will run long off a lithium cell.
Isn't IPv6 a feature of the Linux networking stack? Shouldn't everything that runs Linux be IPv6 capable? Or is there some IPv6 stuff implemented in hardware here?
The author writing this article picked up something nonsensical - the entire second half suggested they knew little to nothing about the IPv6 protocol, and this devices implications for such, including statements like, " formally launched in June 2012. "
