Ask HN: Middleground between arduino and raspberry pi?

by kuon on 7/12/2017, 3:32 PM with 2 comments

I was asked by my father who is a doctor, to build a prototype medical device for some idea he had.

I did a lot of toy projects using either the arduino or the raspberry pi.

For this project, I need something low power (will run on battery) that will receive data from a few sensor (so it need GPIO) and display this data on an OLED display (I need to plot a graph and display a few metrics).

I feel like the arduino is a bit too low level, the goal of the project is to focus on the idea my father had, not writing a plot engine in C.

The raspberry pi on the other hand seems way overkill (and uses too much power).

So many boards and solutions have flourished lately, I'm a bit lost. The arduino drama didn't help and I lost trust in everything arduino.

I need:

- As low power as possible

- A few GPIO, 5 are enough

- An easy way to drive something like 2x10cm OLED display

- About 1mb of writable internal storage

- A way to prototype and debug that is easier than having to load the program on the arduino. For this the PI is good because I can just run pi programs on linux.

  • by danielvf on 7/12/2017, 3:53 PM

    For a prototype there's nothing nearly as easy to use as a Pi or an Arduino. Could you just use a Pi Zero W? Those are pretty small.

    On the small side, have you seen the ESP8266? Try the adafruit Huzzah version for your first one. You can program them from the Arduino IDE, so that you can use existing libraries.