Hi All,
I've been toying with a project idea for years now & it looks like the available hardware is now up to it. I'm a hardware engineer & have a little software experience & even less networking experience. So I need some advice on where to start.
I've tried to describe a simple overview of the project in generic terms. It consists of a number of "sensors" and "controllers". Sensors will be Yun based plus my own hardware, while controllers may be Windows PC or PI (or similar). Controller software can be Python or Java (#1 kid is into Java). They may or may not be on the same network so the system needs to operate through firewalls. It needs be rugged & therefore I don't want to use any online resources or route everything through a single piece of hardware. i.e. I'd rather not use something like Spacebrew since if the server goes down, the system goes down.
Data between sensors & controllers can be text based & consists of measurements (sensor to controller) & control/config (controller to sensor). There is not a 1:1 relationship between sensors & controllers. So, controllers need to gather info from 1 or more sensors & they need to be able to control any sensor in the system.
Sensors cannot be polled from controllers since external events can cause the sensors to start measuring. So, sensors need to autonomously send data to all connected controllers. Plus, since controllers are manually operated, they need to send data to sensors immediately an operator changes something.
If I was designing this in hardware, everything would be address mapped & a sensor or a controller could simply send a messge to any other address mapped device. That's what I need to implement over a network.
So, where to start? I'm sure there must be some networking infrastructure already done that could easily handle this.