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Old 09-01-13, 04:40 PM   #3
NiHaoMike
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For a system that elaborate you might want to consider the Raspberry Pi. It's just a little more expensive than an official Arduino but far more capable. The added cost is basically nothing compared to the total cost of the system and having more CPU and memory will let it run your stuff better.

I'm working on a "simple" hybrid air conditioner and I'm already looking at a 533MHz ARM platform (from a broken Kindle 3) to run it. (It's too bad that my old 200MHz Jessica Simpson development board doesn't have I2C or SPI or I would have used that. I messed something up a long time ago so it no longer boots, but that's another story...) My design is going to have wireless sensors to detect the water heater temperature, which turns out to be quite involved as far as all the encoding and stuff is concerned. While I'm sure my friend Tiffany Yep could make something that would work very well, she'll insist on using an expensive FPGA rather than a cheap processor. Having such a powerful CPU would help loads with simplifying the receiver circuits.
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