The Xport looks pretty interesting. Now I need to figure out something cool to do with the darned thing.
I'm thinking, assign the Xport a hard IP address. In the router, map port 80 to the Xport's IP. Would a connection to www..dyndns.org forward a connection to my IP address of the moment on port 80?If so, it looks like I have a solid way of connecting the Xport to the net.
If that all works, the question becomes "what to do with it?" I'm open to ideas.
That should all work fine.
The XPort does act as a webserver, but it is limited. There is no ability to run scripts on the XPort, only serving static web pages - except, you can write a java applet to store with your html which gets loaded and runs on the browser. This java applet can open a telnet type connection back to the XPort (you'd need another port open on your router) which will send the data through its serial port to your processor, your processor would then return the appropriate data to the XPort which sends it via the telnet connection to the java applet in the browser.
Phew.
The webserver memory on the XPort is split into 6 x 64k chunks. It means that a web page can be no more than 64k and (I'm not 100% on this) you only get 6 pages. (It might be more accurate to say 6 applications, I'm not sure).
Another thing - the datasheet overview mentions SMTP. As far as I can tell, you can only configure the device to send preset emails to a preset address based on the state of the GPIO pins.
Also, the XPort doesn't support DNS. If you want to use it to access information on a server on the internet (say page scrape traffic info for your city) you have to specify the IP address of the server. These are not fixed, which could cause problems in the future. A work around for this is to use PING and parse the IP address from that.
I think the XPort is a great little device, but it does have some limitations which are not apparent when first reading the datasheets.
Regards,
Mike