[Partner Content] SunASIC Technolgies has created an innovative way to control your peripherals using any browser on any operating system, without needing to install any drivers, apps, or extensions. The demonstration code on a Cortex-M4 only takes 15 KB Flash + 14 KB SRAM.
SunASIC Technolgies has created an innovative way to control your peripherals using any browser on any operating system, without needing to install any drivers, apps, or extensions. The demonstration code on a Cortex-M4 only takes 15 KB Flash + 14 KB SRAM.
Designing and providing an interface for people to interact with embedded systems is always a challenge. Some products may have buttons and LCDs, which may be more challenging to use as devices get smaller. Wireless connections via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth are common, but come at the cost of hardware and software complexity, and require an app for each of the Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.
The innovative "EZ Dashboard" solves this problem by allowing peripheral devices to communicate with the web browser on the host computer. A simulated file system on the peripheral device presents an HTML file to a computer browser. Users can press buttons or enter text on the webpage, establishing two-way communication between the browser and the peripheral device by encoding command messages into a sequence of read operations, thereby bypassing operating system limitations. For example, the command LED_ON is translated into disk accesses to the file /root_path/L/E/D/_/O/N/0.TXT. The peripheral firmware processes the block numbers requested by the host operating system and recovers the command code sent by the webpage.
At first glance, it may seem that deeply nested file paths require huge amounts of disk space. However, all directory and link information is created dynamically and does not require physical storage, except for the HTML file. In the demonstration video, the simple LED control application consumes only 14 KB Flash memory for the emulated file system and 14 KB SRAM working memory.
With EZ Dashboard, a system designer can take advantage of the rich capabilities of HTML to create sophisticated user interfaces that work with any browser on any operating system. HTML files included with peripheral devices expand the possibilities for device configuration, maintenance, monitoring and emergency rescue without the need for expensive hardware or platform-dependent apps or drivers.
The EZ Dashboard concept is patented in the United States and China*. It's completely free for non-commercial use. For a commercial license please contact us today.
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