Networked Artifacts

Seminar given by Albrecht Schmidt and Christian Decker, TecO, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
at Starlab N/V, Belgium

Abstract.

In the seminar the question how to build and prototype networked and in particular web-enabled artifacts is discussed. Internet protocols are suggested as means of communication, because they are well understood and many implementations (in hard- and software) are available.

Four Options for building networked artifacts and appliances are presented. In particular MCU based systems, PC based appliances, standard software on custom-hardware computers, and general purpose mini systems are compared.

In the main part of the talk an introduction to the IPC@CHIP, a general purpose mini systems using a 80186 core with multitasking DOS, is provide. The IPC@CHIP hardware offers two serial lines, a 10BaseT interface, and a number of I/O pins and has a size of 44mm x 22mm x 9,5mm. The OS is compatible to MS-DOS3.3 and offers multitasking capabilities, a web-, a telnet-, a ppp-, and ftp-server, and can be configure via DHCP. Software development can be done with any MS-DOS compiler.Finally we introduce the networking, serial-line, CGI, and I/O API that was developed TecO to support rapid prototyping of networked appliances.

The seminar is then concluded with the discussion of a number of case studies where we used the IPC@CHIP in research and development projects.

The slides can be found at http://www.teco.edu/~albrecht/publication/networked-artifacts/

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