Webserver

Hello Ron,

when Fritz and I started the development of the additional Wiznet driver based
on the 5100, we discussed the necessary TCP/IP enhancements. We agreed
that we must have a HTTP server and a mail client in addition to the already
existing drivers for DNS etc.

After this big disaster with the 5100 chip Fritz was so disappointed that he
cancelled all further development. I hope I can "switch" him on again.
We must work together here, he is the Ethernet guy and I'm the kernel and
realtime guy.

rolf

Rolf,
I am not sure if you are familiar with the way that Rabbit handles this with their dynamic C / Rabbit web package but it is very nice. For an investment of about $300 US you can get a web based application going very quickly. This assumes of course that you don't have existing hardware and want to be writing C code..........

A summary of what they do is that they allow you to declare a variable something like this "web var_name as char" which tells the compiler that the variable needs to be accessible to the C code as well as the HTML page.
That means that while your application and web page need to have the same variables, etc the actual server module doesn't need to be modified from project to project and it appears to avoid CGI scripts.

The Simplelan product that I mentioned earlier is even more simple. It interfaces using a serial port. You write the variables to the module and they supply a utility that matches up the variables with the locations in memory. To send emails you just send the necessary parameters: smpt server name, user name, password, To:, From:, and then the message. It is simple but seems to be a sensible idea.

We can't use that module because the data that we need to share totals about 2K.

We are using the webserver as a GUI for monitor and control. The user needs to be able to log in and look at some parameters, change alarm and warning thresholds,etc. In addition we need to be able to allow them to set up the device (IP address, gateway, etc) and the email functions (server name, who gets the emails, etc) We only need some very simple security and the page that I linked you to does it using the standard HTML password stuff.

We are hardware guys who do firmware because we need to. This makes compilers like AVRco and BASCOM attractive and time saving tools. With this type of functionality as well as the Modbus, multitasking and the data structures not offered by Bascom it would make life much more pleasant for us.

Thanks for all the time you have put into discussing this issue. I think that web enabled devices are very popular now and it will in a short time reward your efforts.

Ron

Hello Ron,

Fritz and I discussed this dynamic insertion of data into a requested web page.
Only this really makes sense. Simply sending a static page is easy but not our
main goal. We thought of storing the page content anywhere, internal Flash,
external memory and also SD/MMC cards with FAT16.

We thought of some identifiers in the page data stream which then must be
exchanged by the driver with some life data. But no further exact ideas how
to do this. But we were sure that we can handle it in this or a similar way.

rolf

Here is another method of handling the app code <> HTML interface from Netburner:

http://www.netburner.com/video/dynamic_html.html