On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 12:45 AM, Dan Egli <ddavide...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Many home-brew/DIY projects lack the polished look of the commercial > models. But they are fun to get assembled, and work better than a > commercial model too.
Dream on (in this particular case). You ignored the part where I said it wouldn't be as good. If you DIY a router over pi USB (the only way I know how to do it), it's going to be a lot slower than commercial router box, even though it has more processor and RAM, and runs a complete Linux distro. Beaglebone has better USB hardware, but it's still USB. If either of them had [mini]pci[e] expansion, it might be possible to do something approaching the speed and reliability of a commercial router box. Which brings me back to the original question. The GPIO pins on arduino and pi are designed for interfacing to control and DIY electronics. In theory, one could design an ethernet board to work over that interface. But it would be a kludge, not something better than a pci NIC (or maybe even a USB NIC) because high-speed data transfer is not what they're designed for. Pi is designed for an educational tool, maybe a set-top box, which it sucks at, and has been coerced into some arduino-type applications that could use more processing power or easy networking (home control, monitoring, robotics, electronics, etc.). Beaglebone is much more capable at the last one, and either can do lightweight serving that doesn't require much file or network I/O. Outside that, you're putting a square peg in a round hole. I love my pis. I've had one running my sprinklers for a couple of years, and I'm setting up one to control my z-wave temperature/flood monitoring and WiFi thermostat. But there are just some things they don't have the hardware to do well. Barry /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
