I like to tinker and have in the past done some Arduino projects (written in C). These days, developing on a “real” computer seems much more sensible. I’m curious what people think about Raspberry Pi vs. iOS.
Specifically, I’m comparing a brand new RPi + Touch Screen Display shield vs. an older model iOS device (iPad Mini or iPhone 4S). It seems like both would cost about ~$100-200.
iPhone/iPad fit & finish is much more polished, but RPi has much better input/output options. My projects would involve some communication (so having WiFi would be nice) as well as monitoring and control of low voltage devices such as temperature sensors and LEDs. CPU usage would be modest. Not sure if I care about 32/64 bit CPUs.
I would think that the Pi would be a better option given your monitoring/controlling of external devices. At this point in time you can debug run an iOS app, but not a Pi one (although that will change).
don’t loose time with an ios device for connecting to the outside world : you will use most of your time to struggle against all the protections ios is fiiled of to prevent going to the external world.
use an ios device only if you have to use another ios only app at the same time on the same device (i.e. someone that has to use your app and a note app that he must synchronize ?) otherwise the Pi will make a good job for I/O things.
but anyway as you knowthe arduino world, I still think it’s overkill to use a Pi to monitor only temperatures and light leds.
also it’s much easier to do these on an arduino than a Pi.
and if you need wifi, then an esp8266 is the choice next to arduino.
In my article in xDev 15.1 I discuss my project of building a lab-setup for a school.
In that project we ended up using Raspberry Pi 3 for the measurements (analog and 1-wire sensors). On the RPi we put a Xojo WebApp and with Wi-Fi connect iPads for the UI. This gives you more flexibility that the 7" touch screen for the Pi.
If you’d go with the ESP8266 I could recommend the Adafruit ESP8266 Huzzah Breakout board ($9.95). It’s breadboard friendly and has some other stuff build in
You could create wi-fi sensors with the ESP and send data through MQTT to your RPi + touch screen.
I once created a wi-fi temperature sensor as a test that sent data to an RPi using MQTT. Worked great!
I recommend esp8266 too. We are using it for building automation. You can open gates, get / set temperature, send mail, can work as a webservice, lock doors, grant / prevent access with it. Very reliable and cheap. You can access the esp8266 with ios, mac apps too.
Thanks for all the recommendations - although I know C and have done Python (etc.) programming being able to use Xojo (a single language and a single IDE) is important, so I think that rules out the esp8266 as it’s an Arduino project, right?
The idea of using a Raspberry Pi running a Web app is interesting: that way I could use whatever UI device I choose (iPad, iPhone, Android…) and could even access the device wirelessly by more than one device.
Question: is it possible to run a Rasperry Pi web server over Bluetooth to an iOS device? Or would I have to use WiFi for that?
[quote=321356:@Michael Diehr]Thanks for all the recommendations - although I know C and have done Python (etc.) programming being able to use Xojo (a single language and a single IDE) is important, so I think that rules out the esp8266 as it’s an Arduino project, right?
The idea of using a Raspberry Pi running a Web app is interesting: that way I could use whatever UI device I choose (iPad, iPhone, Android…) and could even access the device wirelessly by more than one device.
Question: is it possible to run a Rasperry Pi web server over Bluetooth to an iOS device? Or would I have to use WiFi for that?[/quote]
the bluetooth stack is very limited on an ios device. you will enter a lot of trouble with that method.
if you want to use ios, stay to wifi devices, that’s all that is available completely.
[quote=321129:@Albin Kiland]If you’d go with the ESP8266 I could recommend the Adafruit ESP8266 Huzzah Breakout board 9,26 (($9.95)). It’s breadboard friendly and has some other stuff build in https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471
[/quote]
I bought some of these for less than $4 and it’s essentially the same ? http://www.ebay.com/itm/191827530351?rmvSB=true
In our setup we installed the hostapd package to the RPi and it runs its own Wi-Fi network so students can connect both the iPads and their own devices.
