View Website Through Serial Port

Question

I have an embedded system running a web server that will usually be connected to an Ethernet network so users can simply enter the IP address of the device to access it.

However, I also need to make some of the same website functionality avaiable to users of the serial port on the device. It would be nice if I could reuse some of the logic I've developed for the web forms for this.

I am currently using .NET for development on my desktop and my embedded device is Linux based. Is it possible to host website content via a serial port or is there some other means by which I can pull this off?

Answer 1

Just a wild guess: back in the days when you connected by modem to the internet, there was a SLIP protocol: IP over Serial Line. Could you use that to establish an "internet connection" to your device?

Answer 2

There are a few options:

If the server is to be in windows, and you have windows 7 then windows xp mode (1) (2) will allow you to use SLIP so that you can provision over serial as you would to any IP address by mapping the serial port to an IP address.

Alternatively there is a sourceforge project called Contiki which has source code to allow the same if you fancy coding your own (the class is called uIp TCP/IP Stack).

Let me know if this is roughly what you're looking for and I can focus in on your specific requirements if you like:)

Cheers.