On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:58 AM, A. Chase Turner <chase@stumpy.com> wrote:
I am seeking a $100 turnkey micro hardware appliance to plug into a LAN hub (behind a consumer-level cable modem) whose only purpose in life is to send heartbeat (and simple quality of service metrics) to a pre-configured central aggregation service on the WAN. Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must [snip] I think your expectation of finding an off-the-shelf turnkey unit that will do such a specialized thing for $100 or less with no extra work, is a bit unreasonable. Your requirement is such a niche requirement, that there is little demand for such a unit, meaning you won't find a mass produced hardware component out of a box specifically designed to do that specific thing at optimal cost, and general purpose miniature embedded computer boards are cheaper.
From there you need to build the configuration GUI, write some
Although you get the work of building the firmware components to make it do what you intend. Companies that build products for such a niche market need a decent margin for each unit sold, to compensate for low volume. I would say look at something like a Soekris net4501 or other low-cost mini computer board, that you can load a flash card on and install BSD on; I think approximately $90 for board + case, then you need to factor in cost of other components such as flash memory. scripts, and build an image to load on your customized general purpose computing devices. Your end user doesn't need to do all that extra work of scripting or copying data to the unit as long as you provide the pre-assembled unit with your prepared image -- -JH