3 ms·

> We lost this in the age of USB.. And got it back with rpi with true gpio pins

by zokier 5y ago

orangepurple 5y ago
RPI is $70-110 in the United States nowadays. There has got to be a cheaper alternative that is widely available like some sort of NodeMCU?
- PeterisP 5y ago
  There are many cheap system-on-a-chip microcontrollers that have enough computing power for many basic uses for which RPi is overkill, and some GPIO and built in wifi and/or bluetooth wireless, and they support dev frameworks like arduino or micropython. Another comment mentioned a bunch of other models, but I had some fun with the Espressif ESP32 platform where the bulk chips are like $4 each (depending on quantity) but there are some nice beginner-friendly devkits using the same chips for $15 like https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/atom_matrix https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/atom_matrix or https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-controllers/products/atom-echo-smart-speaker-dev-kit https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-controllers/products... that are sufficient for a bunch of tasks.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Just because demand is high doesn't mean you have to pay more. https://twitter.com/rpilocator https://twitter.com/rpilocator tweets stock alerts - and they are pretty regular.
StillBored 5y ago
Well, if your ok with the non-realtime characteristics of the RPi's GPIO via linux userspace, one might as well just buy one of the dozens+ of USB->GPIO adapters all over ebay/amazon/aliexpress/etc with windows/linux/etc drivers. Or if you need something more advanced than basic LED blinking/etc, just pick up a wemos D1, or any of the dozens of other similar microcontrollers that can be had for a dollar or two that have GPIO and a USB serial interface and do your bitbanging on the ESP8266/etc in an environment that isn't susceptible to a heavyweight OS failing to schedule your task for long periods of time. One can hang that device off a PC and talk to it with simple serial programming/commands or just plug it into the target device as a wifi adapter and do all the control over Wifi+JSON/etc. Which it turns out are basically what most of the USB->GPIO adapters are anyway. So, in the end, using a RPi for this is really sub optimal on every front, cost, performance/accuracy, complexity, power utilization, etc.

> We lost this in the age of USB.. And got it back with rpi with true gpio pins

by zokier 5y ago

> We lost this in the age of USB.. And got it back with rpi with true gpio pins

RPI is $70-110 in the United States nowadays. There has got to be a cheaper alternative that is widely available like some sort of NodeMCU?

PeterisP 5y ago
There are many cheap system-on-a-chip microcontrollers that have enough computing power for many basic uses for which RPi is overkill, and some GPIO and built in wifi and/or bluetooth wireless, and they support dev frameworks like arduino or micropython. Another comment mentioned a bunch of other models, but I had some fun with the Espressif ESP32 platform where the bulk chips are like $4 each (depending on quantity) but there are some nice beginner-friendly devkits using the same chips for $15 like https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/atom_matrix https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/atom_matrix or https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-controllers/products/atom-echo-smart-speaker-dev-kit https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-controllers/products... that are sufficient for a bunch of tasks.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Just because demand is high doesn't mean you have to pay more. https://twitter.com/rpilocator https://twitter.com/rpilocator tweets stock alerts - and they are pretty regular.

StillBored 5y ago

Well, if your ok with the non-realtime characteristics of the RPi's GPIO via linux userspace, one might as well just buy one of the dozens+ of USB->GPIO adapters all over ebay/amazon/aliexpress/etc with windows/linux/etc drivers. Or if you need something more advanced than basic LED blinking/etc, just pick up a wemos D1, or any of the dozens of other similar microcontrollers that can be had for a dollar or two that have GPIO and a USB serial interface and do your bitbanging on the ESP8266/etc in an environment that isn't susceptible to a heavyweight OS failing to schedule your task for long periods of time. One can hang that device off a PC and talk to it with simple serial programming/commands or just plug it into the target device as a wifi adapter and do all the control over Wifi+JSON/etc. Which it turns out are basically what most of the USB->GPIO adapters are anyway. So, in the end, using a RPi for this is really sub optimal on every front, cost, performance/accuracy, complexity, power utilization, etc.