Weather Station Project #19 - Thinking of Switching to a USB over IP Solution for the Console

I have been having some issues with weewx over the last couple of days.  It has been almost a year (July 2014) since I installed the Vantage Vue Weather Station and weewx on a Raspberry Pi.  Everything has been going real well except for the last couple of days.  It is looking like maybe the SD card is starting to give way because the RPi has been crashing? or weewx has been crashing?  I don't know at this stage.  I need to meter the RPi to get a crash dump if weewx stops working.  I have the RPi setup to start weewx when it reboots, therefore it is more likely that weewx has stopped and the RPi remains running.  I would only know that if the crash dump says so.

In the process of thinking about setting up something here, it occurred to me to split out the USB interface on the console to a different RPi.  If I run a virtualhere USB server on an RPi, for $39, I can access the console USB from multiple clients on my network.  In particular, I can access the USB information from my MacMini, and from additional RPis in the house.  So slipping an additional RPi into the mix gives:

This does not limit my ability to use RPi2 for other USB tasks either.  Since it would be physically located in the living room (and I might be able to run both the client and the server on the same RPi) it would be convenient to have other USB devices connected as well.

Update: This might not be as smooth as I would like.  I currently have the RPi5 separated in its own VLAN in order to throttle the output (so Verizon will be happy).  Gotta think that one over.

Wondering about interface in Thin Client

It occurred to me today that if I want to write code for the AVR processor on the iCreate, I will have to have access to the WinAVR compiler/linker and the USB port from a Windows 7 machine.  I could do this by compiling code in a Windows 7 VM running on my Mac Mini but this would mean that I would still have to plug into the USB port on the Mac Mini to get it to download.  I was wondering if I could come up with an across the lan way of having a remote USB port, i.e., redirecting the USB output to the RPi and then on from the USB Hub to the iCreate Command Module.  Conversely, I would like to be able to plug in something USB to the USB Hub and have it appear remote across the lan.  Need to do some further research about this.

Update: I was able to discover a project on SourceForge called USB over IP (http://usbip.sourceforge.net). This appears to have most of what I am looking for. The problem is that there is no part that is useful for Mac OSX. There was a different project at https://github.com/forensix/libusbip called libusbip. I am not sure if they are reflections of each other or not. What I may end up doing is altering both and combining them to get what I need. One thing is for sure, the cost of hardware devices that do the same thing is above $190 apiece. It would be worth my time to give back to the community.