I am looking for some help with development of a consumer product. One aspect of the project requires the embedded device to send and receive an email using an internal dial-up modem. Emails sent and received will contain jpeg images.
Can anyone recommend a good starting point for micro or chipset tailored for such an application.
Are you looking for suggestions for hardware as well as software? Have you decided on any specifics? Sending email is probably the least of your concerns - anything with a TCP/IP stack could do that.
Depending on how embedded your device has to be, there are plenty of freely available OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD) that support everything in the world.
Do you have a target price for your consumer device? That's what will probably be the biggest factor in determining hardware, and thus software.
If you're sending JPEGs, does that mean there will be a camera connected to this box? If so, what kind of interface does the camera need?
Most chipsets that can support TCP/IP can support your needs. But you really need to look at your target costs first. There are plenty of nice embedded system hardware vendors that can offer you a platform to prototype your device on, if not build a shippable product on. We need more details to be more helpful.
Patrick ========= For LAN/WAN Protocol Analysis, check out PacketView Pro! ========= Patrick Klos Email: snipped-for-privacy@klos.com Klos Technologies, Inc. Web:
The target cost is going to be an issue. Hoping to find a suitable processor for ~$12 - $18 in volume of 1k pieces (including external RAM and Flash) Processor needs to capable of reading/writing JPEG to SD card, transmitting /receiving JPEG via email and preferably generate a video signal to output images to a monitor / TV
I have found modem modules [Silicon Labs Si2457 + Si3008] that take care of the email portion leaving a basic dsp processor free for video but they cost around $25. Maybe a higher dollar processor and dumb modem would be a better way to go?
While that works in theory, many mail servers drop connections from senders that appear to be sending the SMTP commands keystroke-by- keystroke (on the fairly valid assumption that it's not talking to a "real" email program or server, and there's little likely good to come from accepting mail from such a source).
But once you have a TCP/IP stack and a connection, sending email is pretty trivial.
The target cost is going to be an issue. Hoping to find a suitable processor for ~$12 - $18 in volume of 1k pieces (including external RAM and Flash) Processor needs to capable of reading/writing JPEG to SD card, transmitting /receiving JPEG via email and preferably generate a video signal to output images to a monitor / TV
I have found modem modules [Silicon Labs Si2457 + Si3008] that take care of the email portion leaving a basic dsp processor free for video but they cost around $25. Maybe a higher dollar processor and dumb modem would be a better way to go?
Le Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:06:35 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com a écrit:
Hi !
Last year we have been delivering many custom boards (35-45) based on ETRAX100LX and AT91RM9200 with an embedded app sending one mail every day (cron - ash shell script). AFAIK no problems have been reported with opening telnet session on a remote mail server. Abviously this is not an absolute proof of concept, the right way is to consider SMTP, POP and MIME RFC specs. May be these are already implemented in a GPL library.
How are you making out with this project? Have you checked out the UBICOM
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line of processors? They should be about $15 or less for your quantities.
There's also Luminary Micro
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which could be as low as $8 per.
Each has their pros and cons. Let us know if you have any questions or want to know our experiences with these 2 processor families.
Patrick ========= For LAN/WAN Protocol Analysis, check out PacketView Pro! ========= Patrick Klos Email: snipped-for-privacy@klos.com Klos Technologies, Inc. Web:
1) A conventional 3rd party ISP? In that case you'll need to do it in a standard way (and you'll need an ISP that you send trafffic to port
25, most would block that). Still, you can really minimize the process by simplifying and pre-assembling most of the message, then just inserting the addresses and mime-encoded picture on the fly.
2) Modems connected to your own server? In that case you can send anything you want over the phone line, it doesn't necessarily have to be an 'email' but could be some setup data and then transfer the jpeg using xmodem or something. This has infrastructure cost, but you can move a lot off the software complexity to your server.
3) Dialing into a 3rd party ISP then getting at your own sever over the internet, and having your server turn innocent-looking tcp data into an email message - basically your own mini-webmail system only designed to be used by your embedded device rather than a human user. Gets around the problem of ISP's blocking smtp traffic on port 25. You still have to maintain servers but not modem pools.
What I mean is, get the software sorted out and the infrastructure tested with a PC pretending to be the embedded device, then go shopping for a microcontroller.
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