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VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches

Posted by timothy on from the everything-needs-a-web-page dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "How about using VNC to configure your toaster, microwave oven, or even your light-switches? Thanks to Adam Dunkels' micro-VNC server it is now possible to run a VNC server even on really small embedded 8-bit microcontrollers commonly found in such devices. The idea is that even low-cost devices that don't have a screen or graphics hardware could have a GUI, accessible over the network. To show that the server can run with very small amounts of memory, there is a demo server running on a Commodore 64. But the real question is: how would want to 'configure' their toasters using a GUI?"

3 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Why not use a browser? by Matty_ · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I would think something browser-based would be a lot easier and simpler instead of writing a GUI and then having to use VNC to access it.

  2. Why not just HTTP? by strags · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Great... so you have a small embedded device with very limited CPU horsepower. What better way to grind it to a halt than to require it to compress a bitmap of the entire screen, and squirt the result over a TCP connection?

    If you're configuring an embedded device remotely, then it makes much more sense to either:

    (a) use a plain old web page served over HTTP

    or

    (b) serve up a Java applet with a custom dialog that then sends HTTP requests back to the device.

    Both of these solutions are far more lightweight in terms of memory and bandwidth requirements. VNC is just overkill.

  3. Can someone please tell me... by owlmeat · · Score: 0, Redundant

    How this is better than embedded web servers that have been around for years? They work, run in tiny amounts of ram/rom and are a proven solution for embedded control.

    --
    They stab it with their steely knives,

    But they just can't kill the beast.