Today, I spent most of class showing an Alaskan potential student the class's projects. I also set up the Raspberry Pi again, so I can now access it and install necessary software remotely.
The question that must be decided for the project to continue is how to access analog IO pins. I could:
- Slave an Arduino to the Pi. Probably the easiest option, if inelegant. I'm not sure how to connect them over a permanent serial connection, but I know it's been done before.
- Get an ADC and put it with the other components in the breadboard. Dr. Bill does not support this solution, as it would leave the system vulnerable to students. We do not currently have any ADC chips, but they are available from Adafruit for less than $4.
- Use a Pi HAT. A more elegant solution, but dependent on having the right HAT lying around (I'm not sure exactly what HATs we have - Dr. Bill, if you check for one with analog IO ports, that would be appreciated). Also, this is expensive and may have a lot of unused functionality, but efficiency is less important for this project.
- Switch platforms entirely to something like the Particle Photon (a simple IoT board with enough IO pins to run everything properly) and program it in Node.js rather than Python. I have a Photon, although using Node.js with some of the functionality I am looking at currently may prove more difficult. This would definitely improve the accessibility of web integration.
Next week, I will need to decide which solution is the best, and implement it.
grayson_o
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