Easy to use Household Temperature Monitor?

Jim Carroll asks: "I awoke this morning to a gas furnace that conked out. The house was 60F. We had to turn the switch off and on to get it working again. Fair enough -- but I'm worried about it going off when I'm travelling and having the pipes freeze. I'm looking for an inexpensive, simple to use temperature monitor/sensor that would plug into a USB port, that would then log household temperature to a server, so that I can view it through my broadband connection while travelling. Sure, there are all kinds of complex X10 solutions; there seems to be a few kits out there; and some high end industrial applications, but these all involve spending a few hundred dollars. I want simple, straightforward, cheap -- plug it in, and it dumps the temp every few minutes to a file. But there doesn't seem to be anything that is simple, $10-20, that is consumer oriented? And if not, why aren't companies yet making this type of device?"

Comments

Why not?

[sweede]

1) There probably is 0 market for this device.. no wait, 1 person market.
2) you couldnt hope to get something like this without spending lots of money (well more than $10)
3) if you have any EE experiance or even PIC programming experiance, you could whip one up yourself using some schematics found here, http://www.commlinx.com.au/schematics.htm and learn some basic RS-232 programming, then get yourself a serial to USB converter (around 40$) or just use the standard serial port instead.