Display Monitor Devices

[jebatty]

Increasingly various monitoring devices are IP addressable. I have one with a private IP address, but to view the output I need to leave my computer on all the time (or use the smartphone wi-fi access), resulting in waste of electricity and overkill. I had an old Asus linux-based Eee notebook sized computer I was not using, and it works great to do this monitoring on a continuous display basis at minimal electric use. I see on closeout sites lots of low-end tablets that have web software, and it looks like for very low cost these can be used to monitor various devices by accessing their IP addresses. What's the thought on this? Other ideas, options?

Another question, is there a way to access the raw data output from IP addressable devices? I think much of this may be *.txt output, at least that's what's downloaded to my computer when I request a data dump. I'm looking for more flexibility in accessing and analyzing that data.

 

[ewdudley]

There's a tremendous amount of work out there available for Linux for talking to the widest variety of arcane networked devices, but unfortunately there's a lot of stuff that has been done by smart guys working in isolation that's completely proprietary. But fortunately most of it's not proprietary for the purpose of obfuscation, it's just that it is often a lot easier to throw something together that gets the job done rather than develop to some standard, so usually it is easy to see what is going on under the hood.

I'd say start with a 'full-size' Linux desktop or laptop for development work, then port to the smaller target. Wireshark is your best tool for reverse engineering what's going on on the wire/over the air, and it runs on both Windows and Linux. If you're starting from scratch, perhaps Perl, Python, Mono(C#).

And often times if you can't find the documentation you need you can figure out who would know and they are often quite helpful.