30.10.12

October Swag Bag: Web Platform

Dangerous Prototypes sent me a web server from their "Scratch and Dent" drawer. The circuit board was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand — but just how dinged was it, and could I get it working?

Dangerous Prototypes Web Platform


Dangerous Prototypes recently organized a give away of some of their products and I was lucky enough to win a free board. The Scratch and Dent contains prototypes that have failed quality control in some respect and there is no guarantee that they will work. My idea was for an accelerometer-based footpedal, but I had already bought an accelerometer breakout board by the time the competition results were announced, so instead I opted for a tiny embedded web platform. It arrived earlier this month with regards from Ian, with an Amsterdam postmark. Since then he has been spotted in New York, Delhi, and Mumbai — he certainly gets around.

I learned from the excellent documentation that v1c was one of the earlier versions of the Web Platform. Visual inspection of the board revealed nothing untoward. When I plugged it into a USB port on my Windows laptop it showed up as "USB Serial Port" on COM20. Because I did not RTFM it took me a while to realize that I also needed to supply 5 V via the barrel jack and plug in a network cable too. Aha! blinky lights. Better yet, ipconfig/all told me that there was new device on 192.168.1.8 which I successfully ping'ed.

Lastly I followed the detailed instructions to check out the demo software. I uploaded the demo hex file, saw LED LD1 blinking, and managed to echo UART output on a terminal. So far so good — I'm confident the ds33 chip works as it ought to. But when I tried http the IP address, expecting to see a redirect to the upload page, I was unable to connect. Hmmm. I am not quite sure what the problem is, but I suspect it is down to my own near-complete ignorance. Fortunately Dangerous Prototypes has a very helpful forum where I can ask my newbie questions.

Clearly I still have some way to go before I have a functioning webserver in my hands!


4 comments:

Arup Basak said...

Wish you all the best in repairing this board.

Hardcore said...

If you can ping it, the network infrastructure is obviously good ,which means the CPU/ power supply and FTDI interfaces are also there.
... then 95% of it will be be ok.

Tom said...

Yup, I'm pretty sure it's something dumb I am doing :)

hli said...

The quick start guide says explicitly that there is no automatic redirect when no content has been uploaded. The URL needs to be specified manually (http://192.168.1.8/mpfsupload for your example).

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