VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @08:28AM 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?"

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Why not just HTTP? by strags · 2002-07-30 08:49 · 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.