Re: A wifi chip with serial i/o pins?

[Kevin <kevin@hackaday.com>]

On Saturday, January 12, 2013 11:29:47 PM UTC-6, BLuRry wrote:
> Just read about this: http://www.ti.com/product/cc3000
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> It would be pretty awesome if the serial pins on this chip were capable of relaying port input/output.  I mean, wouldn't it be awesome to have a small wifi box at the end of a serial cable?  I'm not sure what the extent of the RS232 "test" mode provides, but it's possible that this might be worth exploring, eh?  It's not like Uthernet cards are rolling off the line again any time soon...
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> -B

there are a number of network solutions "on a chip" but they sort of fall into two camps

camp 1 is a interface chip that takes care of all the physical layers and leaves your machine to deal with the tcpip stack and all that fun

camp 2 like the wiznet series does pretty much every thing for you and appears to the host as serial device. sure you can load a terminal emulator and browse wikipedia in text mode. even setup a simple web server. More advanced things like ADT or AGS I dunno... do they support a PPP style connection?

wiznets are not cheap as far as components go (in the land of fraction of a cent parts, nearly 30 bucks for an IC is expensive, but cheap in the grand scheme of things)