Sheevaplug, neat device!

My friend D picked up a few Sheeva Dev Kits and decided to see what it can do. Now I've got one of them and by coincidence 'MisterBazyle' created a MisterPlug page for MisterHouse. So my goal is to put together MisterPlug. :-) So far the upgrade of the OS on the Sheeva didn't go well. I think most of the problems were with the OS drivers (both Windows and Linux) for the Sheeva's serial console/JTAG port. I went to the Plug Computer Forums and asked around. They were very helpful and I was finally able to get the Sheeva upgraded properly. So now I can begin to play. :-)

The Sheeva is a very interesting device. It uses only 7 watts of power but runs a 1GHz Arm processor with 512M of RAM and 512M of Flash. It has a Gigabit Ethernet interface and 1 USB Host port (there is a USB slave port for the serial console/JTAG). While this doesn't sound like much it is enough to control your home. The USB port should be fast enough for many devices to be interfaced and newer devices are now supporting Ethernet. I intend to put the MisterHouse software on a SD flash card. I'll probably need some kind of way to send the logs to a remote machine and only keep a small queue of the most recent messages in memory. That means software needs to be written. The DB is another story and I haven't figured that out yet. I'd like to avoid excessive writing to the flash card if possible. It will be a few weeks before I can say for sure how well this is going but I expect it to work quite well. As usual, more to follow ...