On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Barry Roberts <b...@robertsr.us> wrote:
> 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.
The Pi is designed as an educational tool, but it's built around an
SoC that was designed originally for set-top boxes. It was designed
for that purpose some time before it was chosen to be the heart of the
Pi, and it was quite a capable set-top-box chip at that time. It's
since been severely outclassed by others, and no firm designing a
set-top-box today would choose it. It's still a wonderful educational
tool due to its low price and huge user base dedicated to helping new
users, but it's not really best-suited for much of anything if you're
only considering the hardware itself.
> 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.
You might want to look at some of the new "Internet of Things" chips
that companies like TI and Broadcom are promoting. They both make
fairly cheap development boards that have microcontrollers and onboard
wireless (WiFi, BT, or both) and are in the $20-$90 range. For a WiFi
thermostat, the TI CC3200-LAUNCHXL looks like a great little board at
around $30, and its chip was pretty much designed exactly for the use
case you mention. The Broadcom WiFi WICED development board of similar
features is about $90 (they're a bit less invested in the hobbyist
community than TI is) but I've actually used it for a project at work
and I know it's got a solid WiFi chipset in it. The software framework
and associated build tool is pretty nice; you can use an Eclipse or
Makefile-oriented build process, it will abstract over several free
and commercial RTOS offerings, and comes with libraries and examples
for building web-controlled applications. Everything but the firmware
blob for the WiFi baseband module is distributed as source, and the
documentation is okay, if not exactly great.
--Levi
/*
PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net
Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug
Don't fear the penguin.
*/
