VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches

An anonymous reader submits: "How about using VNC to configure your toaster, microwave oven, or even your light-switches? Thanks to Adam Dunkels' micro-VNC server it is now possible to run a VNC server even on really small embedded 8-bit microcontrollers commonly found in such devices. The idea is that even low-cost devices that don't have a screen or graphics hardware could have a GUI, accessible over the network. To show that the server can run with very small amounts of memory, there is a demo server running on a Commodore 64. But the real question is: how would want to 'configure' their toasters using a GUI?"

Configure your toaster!

[Stephen Samuel]

But the real question is: [who] would want to 'configure' their toasters using a GUI?"

I like my toast darker than my rommmate does. We could set up personal preferences for the toaster and have 3 or 4 'personal setting' buttons on the toaster. It's not worth putting a full gui on the toaster, but you could put some memory into the servo settings and have it controlled over the 'net.

The 'pop up window' when your toast is ready idea is, at worst, a good pun -- but which machine to pop-up the message to could be included in the 'personal prefs' button.

Then, of course, there's the original purpose of the 'MIT internet pop machine' -- which was to notify you of when the machine was out of pop, so you could save yourself a (fruitless) trip to the machine (which was a good distance away from the computer labs)..
If the toaster says it's in use, you can spend a couple more minutes surfing before you go down to make breakfast (or sneak in and steal the toast from your roommate when it's done).
Then again if your roommate is cute, and likes to make breakfast in sensuous undies, you might want to set the toaster to notify you when {s,}he hits the appropriate prefs button.

The possibilities are about as endless as the possibilities of attaching a video camera to a web server (I mean, who'd really want to do that?).

Re:VNC as a KVM?

[waxed]

x2vnc [hubbe.net] aabd win2vnc [hubbe.net] both open a 1-pixel wide window on the edge of your main monitor that picks up the keyboard and mouse input and diverts it to your other VNC-controlled machine that you can still see the monitor of. Works great.