2000-12-22-11:30:28 Tom:
It wouldn't be that difficult to roll a simple Altoid-tin sized board w/ an enet port (he say's before he's done it:)
Sounds right to me.
Seriously, there are a # of SOC in development for refridgerator web-interfaces & the like.
SOC? Or SBC?
Question is, beyond pinging an isolated device, what's most useful?
Keep It Simple, no question.
Could tack on an interface for; temp sensors, power condition monitors, ect.
For cost/benefit tradeoff, I'd personally favour simply a temp sensor. I _think_ it oughta be possible to package a little wart including network I/F and simple-minded temp sensor that powers itself entirely off the ethernet interface itself, i.e. doesn't need any other power supply. Might need to be plugged in for a few seconds before it succeeds in storing enough reserves to make it through link negotiation, but if you could avoid having to plug into a power socket at all it'd be so much handier.
Further, how to best power; wall wart, batt, combination of the two ?
Definitely none of the above. How about a box that responds to just one protocol type, I'd tend to vote for a trivial UDP packet that it doesn't even bother decoding, just checks dst port and tears out src port and addr, with a reply packet containing whatever encoding is easiest to generate of the latest measurement off the temp sensor. -Bennett