in reply to Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?

... if it isn't being used by anyone else?

Along the lines of what I understood GrandFather said: a suggestion would be that in addition to what (great) you are doing, to make (or start a collaboration for) an app using Pi and Perl which is extensible by pluggins. The old art of combining electronics+programming is scarce today IMO, so if you have that skill and can abstract the hardware away, act like the middle-man for more programming-inclined individuals so-to-speak, then you will do us all a favour.

Here is an idea: modern cars have a socket to suck data out of their electronic system, e.g. fuel remaining, speed etc. (keyword: OBD-II, quick cpan-search: Device::ELM327, intro: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-obd-ii/all). So, a Pi kit to interface with the car-can-bus (what a pun) to offer more than a common car-diagnostics tool does (which can be very expensive too) would be interesting: think of the integration to a database, wifi-ing the data home (additionally to BigBrother, gosh). A mechanic could plug that Pi-based diagnostic and the diagnosis goes straight to the car's history DB and prepares a report, or even enquires with online databases about what to do - pretty scary but now this is not our subject. The lighter side of it is logging mileage, fuel and letting you know that "hey you are running out of fuel and the cheapest fuel around here is XYZ"

Pi+Perl : the whole is greater than the sum

bw, bliako

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Re^2: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?
by marto (Cardinal) on Jun 19, 2019 at 08:00 UTC

    "The old art of combining electronics+programming is scarce today IMO"

    I think it's completely the opposite, it's never been more accessible in terms of affordability or easy of use/low barrier of entry.

[reply]

      Sure ease-wise yes I agree with you but who does it?

      From personal statistics/experience: I still have to see anyone of the thousands of smartphone users I see everyday to have a DIY extension board with ADC interfacing with an analogue camera or controlling their pet robot or as a TV remote control. I see a lot of apps doing these using what sensors and ports the smartphone already provides, e.g. interfacing phone to bicycle speed and location.I have not seen yet a DIY one. Perhaps I am living in a non-nerdy neighbourhood ;)

      Gone is the time of soldering more memory to computers or making a joystick or a Light_pen (remember that?)

      Edit: forgot the speech synthesizer

[reply]

        I actually had one of these, maybe 1986? It was off the shelf, but then I was about 7 years old at the time. In terms of "but who does it", there are many people cutting their teeth on physical computing, Arduino (or compatible) or Rpi with GPIO, either at home using the amazing resources now available online, or in code clubs, hackerspaces and coder dojos or alike, all around the world. An arduino clone can be picked up for less than $2 US, and the toolchain is very user friendly.

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