What is the DreamBoard?

Since Dream Board is really a wish-list generator, have you considered looking at what's available (Processor and other component-wise) to see if you could, given the right skills, piece together the board?  That would be a fun challenge, wouldn't it? Then maybe you could partner with/learn from others with more circuit design skills, to help you actually create a board design then farm the design out to  a company like OSH Park or DirtyPCBs to get the circuit board made in small quantities... It's a thought. :-)

If you want that level of control, and only want to have the device, you have two choices. Neither of which involve designing your own board. 

Option 1: Use a cheap PC with a firewall based variation of linux / FreeBSD /OpenBSD installed, and two cards. PCs that cost $200 are more than capable.  This is the low cost high effort option. 

Option 2: Buy a specialized device from a vendor.  Many network hardware companies offer these devices, as Mr Stanton mentioned Cisco is one such provider. Perhaps it's just a learning curve that you need to tackle to get the job done, if it's not immediately obvious.  This is the higher cost, lower effort (but not low by any means) option. Traffic analyzers and firewalls are not set and forget items. :-)

Now... If you want this board because you want to do something practical while learning advanced electrical engineering skills, I say ditch DreamBoard, pick up Eagle, and be prepared to spend a good chunk of money on various prototypes and their incarnations while you get the circuitry figured out. You will also do well to learn the Linux/ FreeBSD/ OpenBSD internals so that you can use one of those OSes in your end product. They have mature firewall and traffic analysis suites available for them. . . The trick will be making your device responsive enough, yet able to route/fend off the appropriate traffic. Cisco and other network hardware vendors will likely have whitepapers detailing how they go about doing exactly that.  (If this is what you're after, don't let the size of this effort discourage you, break it up into smaller chunks! You'll be glad you did, and you'll learn a lot in the process.)

Happy designing!

Only if you designed it, and sourced the production of it to be cheaper than a Pi, or are happy paying a higher cost because it's something you designed. :-) This tool is really just a highlevel dev-board wishlist generator. It's not a replacement for doing circuit design and board layout. :-)

I don't believe you're required to include sensors on the board. They're provided if you desire them. As others have said, GPIO is the industry standard solution to putting sensors somewhere off board. With that said, I'm pretty sure that the only connector selection that dictates placement is the Arduino compatible connector selection.  However, I would love to see an Raspberry Pi B/2 compatible connector in the available selections. Otherwise the locations are up to your imagination. :-) (And if you dare design this board for production, your own individual placement choices)

ryan thornburg wrote:

 

would it be possible if in the future we could have the board built built for us (even though it may cost more)

Of course! There are many companies willing to take on design for you. One such company here in the UK is Newbury Electronics: Electronic Design & Development | Newbury Electronics Designers

Scott Coppersmith wrote:

 

I like the dreamboard idea.  Some important things aren't captured in the app however.  Some of us need boards that control/measure OUTSIDE.  Think about that for a minute.  What good does a bunch of sensors on the main board do if you're going to use it outside.  You need to protect the main board from the elements, while exposing the sensors to the elements.

Scott

I believe the industry has given this some consideration. They came up with a generally accepted solution called GPIO.

a man can dream, can't he

Remember this is a "Dream board" not a real board. geecco.ceo

Can you build our board and send it to us so that we can use them for projects

You can just create a network tap for that, though, in regards to a traffic analysis device. You don't need to bother involving electronics for it, in fact you would be adding delay by having it go through an electronics board. If you're working in an enterprise network with Cisco switches, you would just setup a port to receive all of the traffic going through the switch.

As for a firewall, maybe, but at that point you may as well use a dedicated full-fat computer for it depending on how much traffic you're receiving to be able to process and act fast enough.

The closest like this at present is the Atmel Sama5d3 Xplained, which has gigabit and 100mbit ports, but the throughput probably isn't going to be nice anyway.