Basic idea: temperature controlled biodome(seed germination) plus zigbee to relay information back to a PC.
I ordered all the parts last week and just got my Zigbee units in so I hope to start putting it together this weekend.
If you have any ideas on how to the get the data from the usb/serial port(on the PC side) to a website that would be awesome.
Get Tom Igoe's book "Making Things Talk" - there are heaps of examples of exactly what you want to do... monitoring sensors and sending emails or updateing websites. Pretty much all the arduino and web server code you need is done.. Can't reccomend it highly enough
Do you have any experience programming? Interfacing the Arduino Diecimilla to Visual Basic at least is laughably simple, and considering all other programming languages I know of (c and all it's variants, pascal/Delphi, all BASIC languages, etc) have fairly easy access to the serial port.. Well, that part is the easy part. =P
The way I would go about getting info from my Arduino onto a website would be to write a 2-part server application in Visual Basic (for simplicity).
Part 1:
Talking to the Arduino requesting values at certain timed intervals, recieving data whenever the Arduino feels like sending it (because something happens "out there"), sending commands to the Arduino to do stuff, etc. Storing data it gets from the Arduino if you want logs, instead of just beeing able to pull the current status of the sensors.
Part 2:
Listening to a network port and serving data to whatever client connects to it. This is also pretty easy with a little bit of googleing, and a little bit of pratice.
Then I'd use php (personal prefference) to make a dynamic website that connects to the VB application we've just made to ask it about stuff.
php:> PULL|log|temp
VB:> LOG|temp|
VB:> 14:00|23
VB:> 14:15|22
VB:> 14:30|24
VB:> END
php:> PULL|input|1
VB:> input|1|186
VB:> END
I see now that this post turned into pretty much just a random rant making very little sense. :-/ Anyhow, long story short...
Application running on Arduino-connected computer pulling and logging values (and possibly doing other stuff like sending email-alerts etc.) and serving this information on a network port with a simple protocol ("language").
Website made with php that connects to application and requests whatever values the site wants to show.