PPP-Blinky - TCP/IP Networking Over a Serial Port¶

The source code is right at the bottom of this page.

Summary¶

PPP-Blinky transforms your mbed-enabled hardware into a standard Windows or Linux Networking Dial-Up Adapter and Webserver using the industry-standard PPP (Point-to-Point) Protocol.

No Ethernet Port Required¶

No ethernet port is required - PPP-Blinky uses the mbed serial port.
The code should run on every mbed ARM platform, such as this LPC11U24:
https://developer.mbed.org/media/uploads/nixnax/blinky-to-laptop1.jpg

Tiny Embedded Webserver¶

PPP-Blinky contains enough smarts to work with web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Curl, wget, Lynx and the Powershell Invoke-Webrequest command.

In the image below Internet Explorer displays a small web page that is embedded in PPP-Blinky's code.

WebSocket Service¶

WebSocket is the most popular protocol standard for real-time bidirectional TCP/IP communication between clients and servers.
In the image below a small Internet Explorer script has connected to PPP-Blinky's WebSocket Service.
A websocket message was then sent by the browser and was echoed back by the WebSocket, triggering the onmessage event in the script.
The WebSocket service enables bidirectional real-time interaction between PPP-Blinky and any element in the browser DOM via JavaScript.

Try PPP-Blinky on your mbed board¶

You will need an mbed-enabled hardware board: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/ Establish a serial port connection between your host PC and your mbed board. The easiest way is to use mbed hardware with a USB serial debug port. I've tried the ST-Micro Nucleo-L476RG, Nucleo-L152RE, Nucleo-F401RE, mbed-LPC11U24 and mbed-LPC1768 boards and they all work out of the box. Use the mbed online compiler to compile the software for your target board. Save the compiled binary to your hardware.

Before connecting, you can verify the operation of the code by opening a terminal program such as Tera Term, and setting the baud rate of the COM port on your mbed board to 115200 baud. LED1 should toggle for every 0x7E (~) (i.e. tilde) character you type, as 0x7E is the PPP frame start/end marker. Don't forget to close the port when your'e done testing, or else Windows Dial-up Networking will report that the COM port is in use by another program when you try to connect.

Creating a Dial-up Connection in Windows¶

Setting up Dial-Up Networking (DUN) on your Windows 7 or 8 PC is essentially a two-step process: First, you create a new modem device, because PPP-blinky partially emulates a standard Windows serial port modem device. Second, you create a new Internet connection (in practice, a new network adapter) which is associated with your new "modem".

Step-by-step description of how to configure PPP-Blinky for Windows here:¶

/users/nixnax/code/PPP-Blinky/wiki/Configuring-Windows-Dial-Up-Networking¶

There is also a screen on how to set up Linux dial-up networking near the bottom of this page.

Connecting to PPP-Blinky from your PC¶

Once everything is configured you establish a dial-up connection to your mbed board over the USB virtual com port.

The IP address you manually assigned to the new dial-up network adapter (172.10.10.1) functions as a gateway to any valid IP address on that subnet. In the screen capture below, I'm sending pings from the Windows 8 command line to my ST-Micro Nucleo-L476RG board over the USB virtual serial Port. I'm also using a second serial port and Tera Term to capture the debug output from a second serial port on the hardware. The optional debug output from the board prints out the IP source and destination address and the first few bytes of the data payload. Note that the source is the adapter IP address, (172.10.10.1 in this case) and the destination is some other address on that subnet - all packets to the subnet are sent to our mbed hardware. For example, you could also ping 172.10.10.123 or, if your PPP-Blinky is running, simply click on this link: http://172.10.10.123

Pings are Fast!¶

In the image below the ICMP echo reply service was tested by sending one million pings from the PC. This took several hours.
The ping tool used on the Windows 8 PC was psping.exe from PsTools by Mark Russinovich - http://bit.ly/PingFast
The average reply time for a short ping (4 bytes of data payload) was 11.23 milliseconds at 115200 baud on the amazing $15 Nucleo-L476RG board at 115200 baud - barely enough time for 130 bytes to be sent over the port!

Monitoring PPP-Blinky Packets¶

The image below is a Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4 capture session.
Responses from PPP-Blinky are shown in blue.
Frame 2 - Mozilla Firefox at IP 172.10.10.1 (the Dial-Up Adapter IP) requests a connection by sending an S (SYN) flag.
Frame 3 - PPP-Blinky at IP 172.10.10.2 responds with an ACK in frame 3. One direction of the link is now established.
Frame 4 - The PC acknowledges the SYN sent by PPP-Blinky in frame 3. The TCP link is now fully established.
Frame 5 - Firefox "pushes" (P flag is set) an HTTP GET request to PPP-Blinky.
Frame 6 - PPP-Blinky responds with a standard HTTP response and a small web page. It also sets the F (FIN) flag which tells the PC to start closing the TCP connection.
Frame 7 - Windows ACKs the data and the request to close the connection. The connection is now down in one direction.
Frame 8 - Windows asks PPP-Blinky to close its side of the connection by also sending an F flag.
Frame 9 - PPP-Blinky acknowledges the close request. The closing of the link is now confirmed in both directions.

Debug Output¶

PPP-Blinky can output handy debug information to an optional second serial port.
The image below shows the debug output for a complete HTTP conversation.
The PC messages are displayed in black. PPP-Blinky messages are blue.
Notice how PPP-blinky automatically inserts a blank line after each full HTTP conversation.

Creating a Dial-Up Connection in Linux¶

The screen below shows the required pppd command to connect to PPP-Blinky from a Linux machine. This was much simpler than Windows! The USB serial port of the mbed LPC1768 board registered as /dev/ttyACM0 on my Linux box. Do a websearch on pppd if you want to learn more about pppd, the Linux PPP handler. Near the bottom of the screen below, two webpages are fetched (/ and /y) by using the curl command on the command line. Gnome Webkit and Firefox work fine, too. Also try echo GET / HTTP/1.1 | nc 172.10.10.2 which uses netcat, the "Swiss army knife" of networking tools. PPP-Blinky was also tested with ApacheBench, the Apache server benchmark software. After 100000 fetches, the mean page fetch rate was reported as 6 page fetches per second for a small page.

Caveats¶

PPP Blinky is an extremely sparse implementation of TCP, UDP, ICMP, IPCP and LCP over PPP, requiring around 8kB of RAM. The minimum functionality required to establish PPP, IP, and HTTP connectivity is implemented. These are often acceptable tradeoffs for small projects as well as an excellent tool to learn the finer details of everyday networking implementations.