rbowman <bow...@montana.com> writes: > On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 21:29:30 -0400, avi.e.gross wrote: > >> If everyone will pardon my curiosity, who and what purposes are these >> smaller environments for and do many people use them? >> >> I mean the price of a typical minimal laptop is not a big deal today. So >> are these for some sort of embedded uses? >> >> I read about them ages ago but wonder ... > > Typically they are used for I/O with the physical world. Some, like the > Arduino Nano Sense, have a number of sensors on the board including a 9 > axis inertial, temperature, humidity, barometric, microphone, light > intensity, and color sensors. MIT chose this for their TinyML course > because it was one-stop shopping. Using TinyML, a really cut down version > of TensorFlow, gesture, wake word, image recognition, and other tasks were > move entirely to the edge device. > > Others, like the Pico series, bring out the I/O pins but have little > onboard. Many pins are multi-purpose and are used for SPI or I2C > protocols, PWM, A/D measurements, and plain vanilla digital. > > The Raspberry Pi series lives in both worlds. Particularly with the new Pi > 5, it's usable as a desktop Linux system, if somewhat limited, while > bringing out the PIO pins. > > It's really a different world than a typical laptop. Years (decades?) ago > you could subvert the parallel port controller to provide digital I/O but > who has seen a parallel port lately? > > There are many families and devices available that are used for any number > of projects that need to interact with the real world. The earliest > variants were usually programmed in assembler since 2k of EPROM and 128 > bytes of RAM was typical. As they improved C was sued. Now there's enough > flash and SRAM to support MicroPython or CircuitPython and they are fast > enough for most purposes. There are specialized drivers but if you know > Python the bulk of the logic will be very familiar. > > For example I have a desktop Python app that pulls weather data from > NOAA's web API. The Pico W has Wifi, so if I wanted to compare NOAA's > temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure to the values I read from a > local sensor, the API requests and parsing the JSON reply would be almost > identical to the desktop code. Conversely I could use the Pico W as a web > server to make its sensor reading available.
That is so cool. I've had the same idea to use the API with AWS for my bbs. I also want to do the same thing for other government sites like ecfr for pulling aviation regulations. Is your code somewhere I can look at it? Daniel -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
