Hand on with Intel Edison

I finally got my hand on this little impressive SoC from Intel. Since I learned about this board some time ago I was eager to get my hand on one to see what it can do. I am currently working with different model of Bay trail at work and we recently tested some platforms to find a low cost, low power solution for an embedded product. So I also had professional motivation to work with this beautiful system.

Meteo Notifier Raspberry PI project building

Introduction

I was returning from my job on a friday afternoon and I was thinking about what I could do with my Raspberry PI to do a small IoT project over the weekend. I was in my car thinking about the Android wear meteo notifications and all the hardware I have at my place and had the idea of doing a simple wood device with two arms that will display a sun on one and a raining cloud on the other. So basically the device will fetch the local meteo from the internet and display the cloud if any precipitation is currently falling and the sun otherwise. For the CPU I choose to use my Raspberry PI (RPi) with the Raspbian Linux OS. I choose the Raspbian OS because it enabled me to code the program using Python using the stock image. Using the default Python libraries to do the PWM control of the servo motor is not the best option because it use a software implementation that made the servo giggle. But I really wanted to use Python for this project and it was not to big a problem for me. As I wanted to build the device rapidly with a minimum of external hardware, I only connected the servo to the 5V of the RPi, even though is not super good for it.