Re^2: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?

That's pretty awesome what you're doing here. I'd love to learn more about some specifics off-line sometime if you're up for it.

I've also written comms software which I use to communicate with microcontrollers (ESP, Arduino etc etc). Oftentimes, I need much more precise timing than the Pi micro-computer can handle, so I use a controller to perform certain tasks, then either poll or read from the microcontrollers for the data they've accumulated.

My community has 20 houses on the edge of a lake. Recently, I designed a system that replaced the manual work in the water purification "plant":

Arduino Metro:

Monitor chlorine mixture tank volumes
Monitor various mixture content levels
Monitor liquid and plant temperature and other environmental aspects
Engage 120v (mains) pumps to fill liquids, with flow-sensors to monitor and ensure the correct mixture of chemicals/h20
Manage various water and chemical solenoids to stop/start flow
Set emergency and warning flags, and disable parts of the system if issues are detected

ESP8266-12E NodeMCU:

Is outside of the purification plant house, facing towards a building on my property about 400 metres away. It is attached to the main device that's inside the building via a 30' Cat-6 Ethernet cable. This cable supplies 12v power along with a Tx and Rx serial line
It polls the inside unit for all of its data using the serial interface
It uses its Wifi connection to a Raspberry Pi on the outside of the building by my house to send all of the data to me

Raspberry Pi

Is on the side of a building beside my house
Is connected via Ethernet to a "dumb" cheap D-Link Wifi-Ethernet bridge
Accepts communication from the ESP over Wifi, forces it through the D-Link on another Wifi connection, which I can access from home
Responsible for simply sending the data to me

Comment on Re^2: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?

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Re^3: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it? by haukex (Archbishop) on Jun 23, 2019 at 22:52 UTC
That sounds pretty cool! And sure, feel free to ask about my systems - a lot of the stuff is already up in the hgpstools repo. For the CO2 logger on my list above, I've been considering combining an Arduino with an RPi, where the Arduino does the data logging and the RPi is only woken up to do the WiFi user interface, to conserve power while it's deployed in the field doing autonomous measurements, but I haven't fully decided on that set-up yet - but now that you mention it, the ESP8266 NodeMCU looks pretty interesting too! Do you use any solution to monitor multiple RPi's, i.e. whether they're still on-line and sending data regularly etc? That's an issue I'll probably have to tackle eventually, as the number of RPi's (and other measurement stations) I deploy grows.	[reply]

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Re^3: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?
by haukex (Archbishop) on Jun 23, 2019 at 22:52 UTC

That sounds pretty cool! And sure, feel free to ask about my systems - a lot of the stuff is already up in the hgpstools repo. For the CO2 logger on my list above, I've been considering combining an Arduino with an RPi, where the Arduino does the data logging and the RPi is only woken up to do the WiFi user interface, to conserve power while it's deployed in the field doing autonomous measurements, but I haven't fully decided on that set-up yet - but now that you mention it, the ESP8266 NodeMCU looks pretty interesting too!

Do you use any solution to monitor multiple RPi's, i.e. whether they're still on-line and sending data regularly etc? That's an issue I'll probably have to tackle eventually, as the number of RPi's (and other measurement stations) I deploy grows.

[reply]