This past week I spent time working on the design of the hardware for our system. It was not very difficult to realize that we didn’t want to hack processors on consumer IoT devices. That would be time consuming and would not have a guaranteed outcome if we ended up not being able to load our software onto those devices. What I think we really need is a standardized platform to build all of these devices on. What immediately came to mind, and what we’ll be using, is a raspberry pi. Being a single board computer (SBC), it’s small and has the ability to run a complex linux kernel. It is also one of the most documented SBCs on the market.
As far as individual devices go, I believe that most of the device that we are going to have in our ecosystem can be created using solderable RPI headers, that will house the simple circuits and components we need for the alarm clock, the light, and the sensor device. For the coffee pot, we want control it with the a relay over a power cable. The reason being that we don’t feel like creating a whole set of electronics for a coffee pot is within the scope of this project, and we want to accomplish control of the coffee pot in the simplest way possible. For the MVP, we’d like to have this all implemented in breadboards, but for the final I’d like to have it all on headers and connected to the board.
