Thanks, and all the best to you as well in your endeavors.
If you're going the Pi route, I suggest you take a look at some of my CPAN modules that I've written for it:
- WiringPi::API: direct wrapper of wiringPi
- RPi::WiringPi: provides object oriented access to various pieces of hardware and the GPIO, with some safety built in, and includes direct interfaces to a BMP180 barometric pressure sensor, and 74HC595 series shift registers (up to 32 extra output pins using only 3 GPIO). Eventually, I'll break these two modules out of this distribution and make them standalone)
- RPi::ADC::ADS: interface to Adafruit's ADS1x15 analog to digital converters (allows you to read analog inputs on the Pi)
- RPi::DHT11: interface for the DHT11 hygrometer (temp & humidity)
- RPi::DigiPot::MCP4XXXX: interface to the MCP4xxxx series digital potentiometers, provides the Pi with a way to output analog signals, without having to use the single built-in PWM GPIO pin
- RPi::SPI: module that allows you to communicate on the serial peripheral interface bus, to aid in writing new drivers for devices that communicate using SPI
Note that some of the documentation may be a slight bit off, as I'm just now going through ensuring everything works properly and is documented correctly.
There are others I didn't mention above, as they don't seem like they'd be of any use to you for your current project. Others that may help though that are in various stages of completeness that aren't yet on the CPAN:
- MCP49xx series digital-to-analog converters (DAC), allows for analog output (similar to the digipot above). These units range from 8-12 bit resolution, and are packaged with either a single or dual onboard output channels
- MCP3008 (and MCP3004) series analog-to-digital converters, providing 4 or 8 analog input pins, with 10-bit resolution