Ours is not the first project to use the Internet for remote control. It is beyond the scope of this document to describe other projects in detail. Fortunately, descriptions are readily available on the Web. Useful Web pages containing pointers to many such projects are available at the following locations:
These projects vary greatly in complexity. Even the simplest of them often involve ``live'' video feedback. They range in sophistication from a simple scheme to monitor a distant coffee pot to an elaborate project which allows people from all over the world to share control of an industrial robot arm. All of these other projects, however, differ from sniffle in one crucial respect: they are without exception primarily demonstrations rather than tools.
By contrast, the simple sniffle system is flexible enough to be adapted to a wide variety of applications. Anyone with an IBM PC and an RTI-815 I/O board can easily customize sniffle to their system and thus obtain control of the most important features of the board via the Web. All that need be done in order to obtain this powerful capability is install WinHTTPD (very easy) and tweak a bit of Visual Basic code (easy).