Sheeva Plugcomputer

A few weeks ago a friend of mine inspired me to install a weather station. Indeed this is a nice hobby project and gives a lot of potential areas to learn something... My obvious goal was to have all weather data coming from the station collected on some sort of server and be able to display it over the Internet. Weather stations typically consist of a suite of sensors (temperature, humidity, rain, wind) you place outside a house and a console that collects and displays collected data on a LCD screen. On higher end models a console can be connected to a computer to relay sensor data.

My requirements have been quite simple. The sensor suite should be very stable (no way to climb a roof in winter to push a reset button), running on solar power for wireless connectivity to a console (cabled connection increases potential lighting damage). The console should have Ethernet /TCP-IP interface. After some digging here and there (mostly in Google) I picked the Davis 6152 Vantage Pro 2. The build is very solid and they have the Envoy with an IP interface to meet my connectivity requirements. Unfortunately the software that comes with the Davis is a complete disaster. It looks and works as a Windows 3.1 application built 20 years ago, with very limited functionality and breaks down everytime I run it...

Digging further for some good software collecting data from weather stations like the Davis Vantage, I came across the MeteoHub at http://www.meteohub.de. To my joy, MeteoHub runs on a Linksys NSLU2 "SLUG" platform. A perfect match - I never wanted to keep a fully blown PC running 24/7 just to collect weather data. Studying the MeteoHub page, I found they also support a new embedded Linux hardware platform - the Sheeva Plug. Dubbed a NSLU2 successor, the Sheeva has impressive hardware specs:

• 1.2 GHz ARM CPU
• 0.5GB RAM
• 0.5GB Flash
• USB 2.0 / Gigabit Ethernet / SDHC ports
• Integrated power supply
  
• Less than 10 Watts power consumption

And all that built in a wall plug, for $99. Impressive platform. No wonder Globalscale Technologies (they supply Sheeva Plug Development Kits) have quite a backlog - it took them four weeks to ship after my July order. Installing the MeteoHub software was a piece of cake and it has been running for a week now. Looking at the way it performs, a dozen of other potential applications come to my mind. The catalog of commercial software for the Sheeva is nowhere near the iTunes or BlackBerry stores. An I bet not many software shops are even aware a platform like Sheeva exists. We should keep our fingers crossed the people behind the Sheeva will be able to spread the word... Or may be someone like Apple will pick it up? Actually there is no reason why a music streaming server would not look like on the picture below :)