Thursday May 2, 2002

A month back I posted a link to Siteplayer, an ethernet webserver on a chip. I bought one with the developers board and even with that extra hardware the rig is smaller than a deck of cards. Pretty cool. Siteplayer is run by Jack Schoof, the same fellow who brought us Lantastic all those years ago. There's a pretty active message group and Mr. Schoof posted a note the other day outlining Siteplayer's near term goals:

  1. New version of SitePlayer firmware with Passwords. Also with initialization for port pins at reset time. Some other minor additions.

  2. Version of SitePlayer with our BasicX operating system in it. See www.basicx.com for more information on the BasicX devices.

    My goal is to have this fully functional as a BasicX processor and at the same time have the web server as a monkey on BasicX's back. This means that code that is written in this embedded Basic will have a direct (and CODELESS) connection to the web server. For example if you do a statement like: j=j+1 in basic and if j was an object in the web server, then the value would immediately change on the web site as the Basic statement was executed. This is a codeless way to display data and it amazingly powerful. The hard part for me is that I am writing the entire operating system and code execution engine again for BasicX in 8051 assembly and at the same time allowing a complete independent operating system (web server) to run at the same time in the same space. All within 16K of code space for both operating systems and all with 256 bytes of RAM - WHEW!

  3. Telnet version of SitePlayer. A completely different operating system dedicated to just COM port to TCP/IP and back again.

  4. Large Memory Version(s) of SitePlayer. I would like to get a version of SitePlayer that has a minimum of 16 megabytes of flash for web page space. This may be in the form of a flash chip or a socket for SmartMedia.