I am thinking of using an ESP8266 or similar to have wireless access to the UART of the Omnia. Right now the UART is completely inside the chassis and so difficult to access. Also, since it’s UART I’d fry it if I used a standard 9-pin serial port to connect to it (after, say, putting my Dremel to some use and mounting such a connector to the chassis).
My idea is to mount the microcontroller inside the Omnia chassis somehow and have the Omnia power it (it’s no big deal if the WiFi only reaches a few meters outside the chassis). There are basically two bits of functionality I’d like to have:
be able to access the UART by somehow forwarding traffic both ways
be able to (hard) reboot the Omnia
This functionality should be accessible via WiFi/WLAN and preferably I’d have it go through SSH.
Is anyone aware of such a solution, even if for some other similar device and not the Omnia itself?
Is there perhaps anything better available to get similar functionality?
Hehe, thanks. Indeed, it could be better, which is why I was asking for other folks to share their experiences.
I was just thinking that perhaps the ESP8266 or the ESP32 (which comes with Bluetooth) could be a cheaper and better fit for the requirements.
Looking at mapping the functionality of the UART I have so far resolved to attempt to use the virtual COM port that can be provided via Bluetooth may be an excellent match for the functionality I am looking for, all using an ESP32. I’ll update the topic (or open another one) if I make tangible progress.
I am currently in the process of realizing this. For anyone else looking into something similar in the future, check out this link. It’s basically a walkthrough of achieving a WiFi-to-serial bridge with the ESP32.
I don’t want to use the Arduino IDE, so I will have to change this quite a bit and I also want to look into using a Bluetooth virtual COM port as alternative to the WiFi bridge, but I am not quite there yet.