One of the coolest things I've seen in a while

This showed up on /. today. It's not that expensive, either! I'd love to get my hands on a few of them.

Yep, I agree. the downside is that the price is for 10,000 units... Who else want some??? ;-)

Imagine, a car full of those for... .... I don't know... ... but all off them linked to the empeg ;-) wow

There's also the drawing of a developper kit on their website... That would be interesting, but as I understand it, you only enter contest once and they pick a name from the people that entered that week... So I will wait 'til it ain't on /. anymore ;-)

If anybody find a distributor for those (in smaller quantity: up to 10 and not 10 000), could you please tell me. Digikey don't seem to even know the company...


Patrick

You can also order in quantities of 1 to 10 of the following:
- XPort Sample case;
- 1 XPort enclosed
- Order quantities of 1 to 10

I emailed their sales team to find out the pricing.

- trs

Anyone interested in that might also like to check out this.

Not quite as tiny, but a similar concept, and available for $30 in the 1-10 quantity region!

I've been meaning to get one for a while and see what it can do...

I emailed their sales team to find out the pricing.

Let us know. I've worked with a bunch of Lantronix and love their stuff. This looks so cool. Now what to do with it??

Now what to do with it??

Seriously. I'm staring at this thing... and i KNOW there's some amazing potential there... but i can't think of any real practical application that I would want to use it for...

what are you all thinking?

Well Jim,
think of each of these devices as a remote serial port for the Empeg.

You know how there is all these amazing things we want to do/plug into our Empegs, but we are limited as we only have the inbuilt serial port to connect them all to?

Well this bypasses that limitation, and provided we have a "in car" ethernet connector fitted to our sleds [and the right software], we can have as many serial devices on the Empeg as we want - each one doing one thing:
like:
GPS data stream from the GPS,
OBDII interface data,
External display interface
External buttons or control devices

the list is potentially endless....

i can't think of any real practical application that I would want to use it for

What excites me about devices like this is the fact that they take us further in a direction where interconnectivity is simply assumed rather than something that is achieved. I wonder how compatible this device is with certain SBC's.

- trs

like:
GPS data stream from the GPS,
OBDII interface data,
External display interface
External buttons or control devices

the list is potentially endless....

Yup! Actually, I'm not as puzzled as I make out. NMEA sprung immediately to mind...along with wheel sensors....and on and on.

I'm just a little foggy on how to make it all work!

My past experience with Lantronix was in interfacing serial lab devices over a hospital's IP network. Their stuff really did work well. I look forward to getting my hands on some of these.....(Hey! potential Alcan sponsor!!)

Seriously. I'm staring at this thing... and i KNOW there's some amazing potential there... but i can't think of any real practical application that I would want to use it for...

what are you all thinking?

I'd love to combine a few of these with one of the cheap RS232 temperature sensor kits I have been using recently to create an Ethernet enabled sensor.

Anyone one know if it supports power over Ethernet ?

Power over ethernet - no, the 4 wires not used for Ethernet are terminated in the device but aren't connected - personally I'd love to see a couple of them available for this purpose.
The onboard micro also runs on 3.3V so you need to have a power convertor to 3.3V from a higher voltage as well.
And it can suck the juice - up to 210mA - some of that probably to run the Ethernet magnetics etc.

It still looks very interesting. It appears to be more of a real computer than some of the devices that people on Slashdot have been talking about when they say "it's been done before".

Xport finally got back to me about the pricing. They only came back with the price on the Dev kit - not exactly what I asked for - but here it is:

--------------------------------------------
Tim,

Thank you for your interest in Xport! In response to your email, the price
on the Xport Dev Kit is $140US. You can place your order thru our
distributors:

SYMMETRY ELECTRONICS
Contact: Mark Bayers
Phone: 310 536 6190
Email: [email protected]
http://www.symmetryelectronics.com

ARROW ELECTRONICS
Phone: 800 833 3557
http://www.arrownacp.com
--------------------------------------------

A bit more than what I anticipated...

- trs

Pricing in Australia is $70AUD for the XPort and $250AUD for the dev kit. No minimum order quantity.

Rod.

What to use it for?

Well, an immediate use for me is remote ethernet access to console ports on servers..

Cheers