Re: [DIYbio] Microcontrollers

On Sep 26, 2012, at 3:05 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:

> 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.

That would be great! However, it would probably be best for me to get my mitts on a Pi and some sensors first, and that will take some time and money. So don't write a tutorial on my account, at least not yet; however, there might be other people on this list, or other amateur scientists in general, who could really benefit from one.

--T.

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