mysterious piece of hardware

[orange]

I bought on flea market this interesting piece of hardware in hope it would allow ethernet connection through serial/parallel port. could it?

[mfilos]

I used a similar but smaller adapter from Serial-->Ethernet when I was using an IBM Line Printer @ work.
These adapters are made for specific hardware thus I find it almost impossible to work out of the box to any other piece of hardware.
Maybe it could work if someone had written a driver for it which at least for Amiga... I seriously doubt it

Good luck though

[hardlink]

That may be a ethernet printer spooler, hard to tell. What would work is an (old) dial-in ethernet modem. I had one I had to leave behind in a move. It had both serial and ethernet connectors that worked even ignoring the modem functions. It was made by one of the big companies in the Mac modem market, maybe Asante.

Edit: apparently these things are called LAN modems, but the one I had allowed serial connection too.

[Zac67]

Possibly a print server - very probably nothing you can use with the Amiga. Most devices with ethernet and serial ports are designed to connect a serial device (=slave) to a network, ie. enable something else to use the network to access the port.
For the other way around, you'll need something completely different - if a device of this kind exists at all. (Well, you could use a COM server to make e.g. a PC connect to the Amiga's serial port with PPP over an ethernet connection - but then again, you can also connect the PC directly.)

Don't forget that if you do manage to connect something ethernet-ish to the serial port, you also need a stack to work with it. If you lack a driver to make an existing stack work, you're bust.

The only thing that could really do the job would be a router with a serial port talking PPP - if it allows you to set the default gateway on the ethernet side, chances are very good to get it to work.

[alexh]

Your photos are crap. ;-)

All we needed was a good closeup of the big chip in the center and we could have told you what it was.

Take a shot of just that chip and post back.

It looks like a "Universal thin server", ethernet to serial.

[Zac67]

Plus anything that gives a clue to make and/or model of the device (case bottom, back of PCB).

The amount of flash and RAM chips makes me guess that it's a very generic PIC that won't give away too many clues.

[orange]

I had to reduce resolution to make files smaller..
have you seen the link on bottom of page? it should be higher res.

anyway, here is writing on bigger chip:
MC68332ACPV16

that's a motorola microcontroller chip. I don't have my motorola 68k product family manual around here anywhere that I can find, but you can find the docs at the link below. That's not much help on figuring the device out, I'm afraid, but good luck...    

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MC68332