For conceptual blockbusting, inspiration, and to get your stalled creative juices flowing, I recommend the following:

• Design News’ Gadget Freak series
• Instructables
• Make Magazine
• Sparkfun
• Circuit Cellar

Gadget Freak this week featured a tiny simple PIC system which calls your cell phone when something happens in your house.  It uses dirt-simple pulse dialing (by toggling the phone line with a relay).  Of course, in the aiosphere we’d do it the hard way, by messaging a server and having a widget SMS you.  Still, very clever and very inspiring!

The key is finding an Ethernet solution which has a dev side and a volume side. I need to get prototyping VERY quickly and easily, but I also need a path to low-cost volume production.  Here is a survey of some of the highly integrated solutions out there. Read more

I’m going to begin with a limited-edition custom network bridge/gateway built into a vintage lunchbox.  I have a nice A-Team one that I can use.  It’s smallish, it’s shielded, it’s better than a black metal box.  I don’t know if I can use a vintage antenna or not.  The ugly black plastic post of a typical router wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it is less than elegant.

I think the hardware is pretty simple for a quick prototype.  The firmware, of course, will turn out to be a nightmare, but if I can get the hardware tested and working, I might be able to sell the boxes for hobby use to support further development.

Jennic now offers a reduced-complexity network stack called Jen-Net, which has about a third of the memory overhead of Zigbee. Their microcontrollers and modules have both stacks in ROM, and applications can run either. This is something I need to study carefully for the aiosphere, which Jennic looks good for anyway. Here is a cursory overview of Zigbee dev kits, which favors Jennic’s offering. Reading their support forums, though, sugests that all will not be smooth sailing if I select this platform for development. Next stop, Ember.