Hi All
In a world of amazingly expensive automation gadgets, here's a $100 no moving parts server that you can use for NAS or an app server or a file server, datalogging, etc. Should be fairly reliable and industrial tough.

http://www.tonidoplug.com

I have no relationship with them, I just think it's cool and could be useful for a lot of things.

Regards
cww

 

The device is based on the Marvell Sheevaplug. Tonido has taken the hardware platform and added their application software to turn it into a consumer device. Their are other companies doing the same thing. If you do a Google search for sheevaplug, you will come up with a lot of other information and help resources on it.

You don't need to use Tonido's software. They are running everything on a standard Ubuntu Linux OS, so you should be able to install pretty much anything you want. Debian also works, and I would expect that Fedora would as well as others. The Sheevaplug has a 1.2 GHz ARM processor, 512 MB of RAM, 512 MB of flash, giga-bit Ethernet, and USB. The whole thing (including power supply) is in a package the size of a wall transformer that simply plugs into an outlet. There is no graphics card though, so your applications are limited to what you can do over Ethernet or USB.

If you have an application where you need a PC in the system to do a dedicated job but don't want the bulk (or other issues) of a conventional PC, this can do the job very cheaply. Some typical applications that I can think of are:

1) Label printing (e.g. bar codes).
2) Web server (e.g. Apache + PHP + MySQL).
3) ERP interfacing.
4) Protocol translating.
5) Database storage.
6) Web based HMI.
7) PC based soft logic system.
8) Network security firewall.
9) Video monitoring or simple vision systems (using a USB web cam).

...) Whatever you can imagine.

I think it's definitely worth looking into.

 

Thank you Michael.

Of most interest to this group would be the Samba server that does Windows file service and the network applications. I tend to think of it as a far advanced PLC (or PAC, if you want to be trendy) using Ethernet IO and being far more interoperable than anything big automation would ever think of allowing out the door.

I didn't mention that it runs Linux right away because I didn't want people to run in terror and ban them in their company before they thought how useful these could be :^)

Regards
cww, still unemployed.