You get an SKR board for about 15 Euro. More RAM, more Flash, more cpu power, 32bit. There are cheap esp boards you can use to control LEDs. They cost about 1$ and come with wifi, BT and more. These slow 8bit boards are a waste of money these days and they always hit back, when you add more stuff and run out of flash memory.
On youtube you find projects using four or five arduinos to control a robot dog. They communicate with each other using a serial port, while you could to it all with some small ARM board without all the programming for each arduino.
In fact I always wondered why there is no “shield” for the raspberry pi, just to make it a full featured control board instead of having an 8 bit ramps board with a shield.
The pi would run marlin in overdrive. Would come with wifi, lan, bt, Display port, HDMI, Webcam connector and more already, so the shield would just need to provide the stuff as a ramps board is doing. Connectivity for stepper, heater and sensors. But no. There are the Duet boards now, doing exactly that on a special board. Or the SKR hardware. Well, just slower and with less features for a far higher price (at least the duet). With a 10 or even 20$ shield for the pi you could easy upgrade to the next generation of Raspberry Pi and the PI that got replaced is still a great webcam, a media center or what ever project you have in mind.
I had not heard of the ESP8266, so I did a little research. So it’s also a microcontroller, but 32 bit instead of 8. However, it seems it’s been superceded by the ESP32.
Yes but the ESP32 is somewhat harder to program and in most cases not needed in most applications. I use the D1 mini development board myself, very easy to program and has a very small form factor.
Well, basically you can use the same environment as for the arduino. incl. uploading. I have placed 20+ ESP32 in my wall as IOT system to switch stuff via voice, on timer, and even switch stuff that has no real switch.
If I do anything with either of my boards it will be copying something that someone has laid out for morons. Something that could be useful and fun to do. I’m certainly not buying another board to lay around collecting dust. I do think of upgrading my printer though. But I need to be sure that can update it easily. I still am stuck with my arduino error message that no one seems to understand, so how in the world could I?
If you configure them to be, then yes. Currently they run using Alexa, which is a semi cool solution, but there is a new voice system for the raspberry pi, that works offline. The long time plan is to use a raspberry pi 4 (you need all the power you can get) to do a complete capsuled IoT setup, that runs without the need of the internet.
Currently I set up everything, so there is no function loss, when the internet is not available. I just loose comfort as I have to use a browser to turn on/off lights that have no physical switch.
I have several rooms that have to many lights (this was a doctors office 10 years ago), so I devided them into groups by adding ESP32 hardware. In my office now I can use one 1 out of 5 LED tubes to light the room, which is far enough. Just when I do soldering or other stuff I turn on the four additional tubes. Saves a ton of every. On my toilet I programmed the light to turn off after 15 minutes. May soldering station only stay on for two hours and powers down automatically and so on. If I am away for some time, I can setup all my lights to a random pattern simulate someone is at home, which is more effective, when the actual room lights are used instead of some random table light.These thingies are quite handy.
That’s “security through obscurity”, which isn’t really secure. As for banking, it’s a very different thing. Online banking is done over a secure HTTPS connection, and the computers behind the website are not only highly secured, they’re also monitored continuously. There are many layers of security in online banking. That’s not something anyone is going to implement for IoT devices.
One way that could help secure IoT devices is to have them only accessible over a VPN. However, that can be somewhat involved to set up.
You can also access your local internet through a VPN server which is very secure. I have some 48 D1 mini’s in my house at present doing various task from running individual addressable LED strips (under vanity’s in bathrooms, under kitchen counters, behind TV as ascent lighting, etc.) to turning off/on and dimming lights all throughout the house to door/window sensors to monitoring temps, humidity, indoor air quality, etc. Using MQTT Broker and Node Red server to control all of it. Of course Alexa and Google voice assistant’s can access most all of them locally. That is why i got into 3D printing. I wanted to print custom boxes for my projects.
Why not? An UNO can run stepper motors just fine. Of course, as you indicate, you will need some device to take the load of the steppers away from the UNO, since it can’t handle larger demands, but that’s what stepper drivers are for, right?
Ah, I see where you’re coming from. I wasn’t thinking of commercial VPN providers. I run my own VPN server, so I know it’s secure. You’re right, a VPN provider is a vulnerability.
