I'm an absolute beginner with little knowedge of programming and even less of electronics... would an arduino manage to download files from the internet and save them on an sd card?
My idea is to avoid having to turn on the pc every morning for some basic routine operations which take less time than the pc needs to start-up...
I'm aware of the fact that at the moment the ethernet shield can't manage to write on the sd, not until atmega328 comes... but still am I asking too much of ARDUINO? Should I go for something like a Beagleboard instead? http://beagleboard.org/
Well, the best thing you can do is get an ethernet shield and if you have a thumbdrive, you can connect it to the arduino USB port and with reading some info you can manage to easily download file to the thumbdrive. Check the WebClient example included in the IDE.
Yes, I think a USB Card-Reader would do the job.
But I don't know if MB files could be downloaded. Could you give me the URL of those files for me to test it?
Well, the best thing you can do is get an ethernet shield and if you have a thumbdrive, you can connect it to the arduino USB port and with reading some info you can manage to easily download file to the thumbdrive. Check the WebClient example included in the IDE.
This is not really true. You would need something like a Vdip module to talk to a thumbdrive.