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Development Board Recommendation Please

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russ57:
What is the project, roughly?

There might be something you want to achieve that would make one a better choice.

Check out clough42 for his build of an electronic leadscrew . Using the ti launchpad because it has a hw floating point processor.

Andreas Speirs has some good stuff.

As does mick make.


The Esp32 offers 6or so capacitive sensors.


I have a beaglebone running my solar battery.
(not my work, it's a Victron product.)

Raspberry pi has great community support. But with a screen gets to be not so cheap.
The arduino is great as an edge device but anything past serial comms gets harder (or $).
The esp8266 has wifi built in.

There are also a number of others- orange pi,

And a huge range of options for screens.


Russ

sparky961:
The project will evolve, which makes it difficult to define.  But I understand the importance of trying to define it before beginning, so here goes:

The entire system will reside in a space about 15' x 8' x 7', with plenty of nominal 12V (7V - 15V) power available.  Sensors, switches, and control will be distributed throughout this space.  The control components will reside in a ventilated, heated, but not cooled environment.  I expect temperatures between 5°C and 60°C are possible.

Phase I
- Completely customizable touch screen interface maybe 6-14", stupidly high definition not required
- Main controller attached to touch screen, capable of talking to everything else in the system
- 3-6 current sensors (0-75 mV shunt, best possible accuracy
- 4-6 point analog voltage monitoring (0.005 V accuracy)
- 10 analog temperature monitoring (0.5 °C accuracy) (could also be digital single wire if cheap sensors exist)
- 10 digital inputs
- 4-8 PWM LED outputs
- 2-4 PWM outputs to control variable speed fans
- 10+ miscellaneous digital outputs

Phase II
- Add second touch interface, capable of controlling anything the main interface can
- GPS logging
- GPS navigation (OSMAND) on second touch interface
- Read CAN bus interface
- Add 4 humidity sensor inputs
- 4-6 PWM servo outputs

Phase III
- 4-6 HD video and audio recording 10 hour loop (if possible... haven't done the math for storage requirements)
- Interface with speakers (of some sort) for audio playback, don't need to be stupidly high quality
- Write CAN bus interface
- Remote server I/O through cellular data interface


So, as you can see if I get all the way to Phase III I'm beyond the scope of a simple microcontroller development board...

russ57:
Ok then... Not your typical starter project..

I'd be thinking for that scale, you need a central 'controller', fairly capable, but I'd be looking to divide and conquer, by separating and offloading discrete functions either by say 'all the current sensors' on a smaller system, or split in some other way that makes sense - maybe a subsystem has its own current, temp, humidity sensors, and feeds into the master system.

Otherwise, you are looking for up to 80 odd io lines, which can be done of course by using things like i2c io expanders but I'd be concerned about scalability. (and stability).

And I assume many of the sensors are external to the main system so you will need to remote them anyway..

Sounds like a great project. Good luck with it.


Russ

sparky961:
Well, I don't know if there's a more logical way to make the decision, but it seems that since I want to be communicating with CAN in later stages that it makes sense to make this the backbone of my smaller subnet.  Having a separate controller just to get a bunch of inputs seems overkill, but maybe I'm just dating myself with that paradigm.  The biggest advantage I can see is subdivision by location so that I don't have to run as much wiring and not as far.  Only the communication needs to come back to the main control, and if I'm not mistaken that's only two wires with CAN.

It certainly isn't a "blink the LED" project.  But of course, that's the first thing I'll do when I finally do pick the boards I'll use.

Having the CAN requirement may help narrow things down to a bunch of inexpensive microcontroller boards ("Arduino" style) that support CAN, plus one or two more powerful SBC (a la Tarte Framboise).

sparky961:
I have a selection of boards on their way. Main controll is likely to be a Raspberry Pi , and a bunch of slave Arduino Pro Mini clones. I'm not worrying about CAN at this point. I'll just use a simple RS-232 link between boards.

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