Affordable home kits?

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by dellagd

RaspberryPi! Its cheap and you can do a lot with it. I'd put it a step above the arduino though as it is a computer in and of itself and you need to know/figure out how to use Linux.

It depends on whether your need is raw I/O or computing performance and Linux (for sockets). If your need is raw I/O the Arduino's Atmel microcontroller will be better suited than the Raspberry Pi. If your need is more computing performance and Linux (sockets) oriented the Raspberry Pi is probably a better bet.

If your need is both for the sake of network connectivity....check out the Arduino Yun:
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoa...cts.ArduinoYUN

Currently using the Yun as a web server for a simple control page with HTML5 and Javascript to do automation over the Internet.

It is a little of both performance and raw I/O because it is both...it's got both an Atmel microcontroller and Atheros (ARM) system on a chip. This enables the Yun to do WiFi while at the same time offloading more real time I/O efforts to the Arduino. Basically this is a $75 remote robot control board at RadioShack

While I am using the Yun to act as a webserver for static pages, one can also use it to service a REST API such that you can use HTTP to make programmatically driven requests to it. So one could use this to...merely for example...make a FIRST like robot and field system or Internet enable your home.

Course one could do this previously with a USB WiFi dongle, a Raspberry PI and an Arduino board all together for higher cost and more integration effort. One could also hack a WiFi router hardware and software and attach an Arduino to that. However in this case it is just handed to you on a silver platter.

The only thing the Yun is missing now is an FPGA integrated into it. However I have lots of Altera and Xilinx FPGA boards I made and bought floating around so that's not much of an issue. One should be able to reconfigure an EEPROM for an FPGA from an Arduino which ought to mean that a WiFi update of the FPGA via the Yun's Arduino would be possible. Such that the entire system could be reconfigured over WiFi.