Arduino Ethernet Device

Projects General Guidance
1

I'm looking for a way to communicate with an Arduino over the company network. I would like to send the value of sensors and some calculations carried out on the arduino in real-time (close to...) to a monitoring program on one of our computers. I'm not really interested in making a webpage that's viewable by everyone. Essentially I would like to carry out the same serial type communication I can get by plugging directly into the computer but over the network. Functioning sort of like a network printer. I would just use serial but as I've found out from past projects, range is limited.

  1. What parts of the ethernet library would be most beneficial for this. (is there another better solution?)
  2. What type of program can I utilize to read the data from the arduino and display it. (java?... Any examples available?)
  3. Would I be able to use the same program to send commands/data back to the arduino.
  4. Could this program stay in standby and display in the notification bar on a windows computer?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks.

2
  1. What parts of the ethernet library would be most beneficial for this. (is there another better solution?)

A standard socket connection. You have to decide if you want the Arduino to be the server or the PC. This decision may be influenced by the network setup of your company. The best example is probably the ChatServer (Arduino as server) or the TelnetClient (PC as server) example in the examples directory of the Ethernet library.

  1. What type of program can I utilize to read the data from the arduino and display it. (java?... Any examples available?)

You can use any current programming language because they all include support for TCP/IP sockets nowadays. You probably will find most samples of how to visualize data if you choose the processing framework (http://www.processing.org).

  1. Would I be able to use the same program to send commands/data back to the arduino.

Yes.

  1. Could this program stay in standby and display in the notification bar on a windows computer?

If you know how to program that on the Windows platform: yes. This question is Windows focused and is not related directly to the Arduino.