In general, this project was designed as a way to combine the knowledge we've learned in previous undergraduate courses such as DC circuits, Digital Systems, as well as Embedded Systems and C++ to develop a system that will allow communication over the network and control a connected system. The system consists of three major parts: the hardware (embedded system), the software on the microcontroller (communication's stack), and the client (written in Perl).

One of the most important ideas in this project is the truth, that most (80% or so) of the communication that occurs over a network is text-based. This means that learning simply how to get text from one source to another destination over a network gives you enough knowledge to do any type of network-enabled embedded system control, and most communication with other network protocols.

The microcontroller that was chosen was the Atmel Atmega168 (AVR) because of it strong community support and heavy documentation. The communication's stack being used is Adam Dunkels uIP TCP/IP stack because it was ported to the AVR series of microcontrollers, and support the ENC28J60 Ethernet controller chosen for the project.