Re: [DIYbio] Microcontrollers

On 27 September 2012 08:23, Tristan Eversole
<customerservice@trioptimum.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 25, 2012, at 3:42 PM, Simon Quellen Field wrote:
>
>> Because the Pi is basically a laptop computer without the screen and keyboard,
>> what you know about the computers you use for home, school, and work will
>> apply to it. The Arduino is nothing like what you are used to, and will take
>> longer to learn, even though it is very simple.
>
>
>> The advantage of a multitasking web connected controller is that you can monitor
>> it from anywhere on your phone or laptop, and it can send you alerts if something
>> goes wrong with pumps, temperature, power failure (use a UPS for your router),
>> oxygen, pH, or anything you'd like to monitor.
>>
>> It can keep a record of all the sensors on the hard drive, so when you kill your
>> first batch, you can find out what went wrong and fix it before trying again.
>>
>> You can watch graphs of all the things you are measuring, and adjust things in
>> response over the web, without having to be home watching it all the time.
>
> You make a compelling argument for the Raspberry Pi. I hadn't spent much time looking at the Pi before, but it's clearly warranted now.
>
> Nonetheless, I think you really hit the main issue on the head in that first paragraph above. The Pi is basically a laptop computer without the screen and keyboard, but that doesn't help me much:
>
> 1) I have no familiarity with Linux, Python, PHP, Apache, bash, etc. I currently have no idea how to set up THIS computer as a web server, or have it display continuously-monitored data as a graph. (Can I use R?) Maybe this is much, much easier than I think it is, or maybe I can get someone to help me, but I wouldn't count on it. I'm hardly averse to learning this stuff, either, but I have a very hard time not exploding into twenty different topics as it is, and I need to watch that.

If you're interested, I am happy to gather some content together for a
tutorial. I'll put it up on data.geek.nz. It can be intensive to write
these kinds of tutorials well though, and would only bother if you're
genuinely interested. If you just want graphs from a data stream, I
recommend Cosm (https://cosm.com/about_us). That way you don't need to
know about the web server component, just how to send data to Cosm.
Perhaps part 2 could be a completely self-service model.

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