With all of the excitement over the World Wide Web on the desktop, the benefits of applying the same technology to embedded devices were fully realized only recently. A device attached to the Internet with an HTTP server running on it can provide for remote access to documentation, monitoring, and configuration of the device from a Web browser on any platform.
In this project, the Jupiter GPS receiver is used as a prototype device to explore this concept. A client-server system gives access to the full functionality of the GPS attached to a remote host. The client is written in Java and documented in HTML, and the GPS receiver is connected to a Motorola PowerPC board running the VxWorks real-time operating system. This integrates important Web technologies into an embedded environment.