There's often a need to get a serial microcontroller or sensor device (GPS, range sensor, etc) that have serial connections onto an IP network. In order to do that though you have to convert serial to an IP data stream. Fortunately, there's a lot of highly integrated, functional modules that can help.

I built a simple and cheap serial to TCP/IP converter using a LANtronix XPort Direct module. Parts cost of this is about $40. Here's a picture of the prototype:

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