A new piece of Pi…

Got a message from the folks at MCM Electronics about the latest offering of Raspberry Pi.  The new Model B offers some interesting features that I won’t go into details about here.  You can find that on their website.  I will note that it has more IO’s than the previous versions, but the fundamental hardware is the same.

What got me to post about this is Apress sent more an offer for one of their books, “Beginning Sensor Networks with Arduino and Raspberry Pi“.  Nothing ground shaking here.  But I had intentions for using Pi last quarter and didn’t.  This book looks like a perfect bridge to incorporate the Arduino experience and bring the Pi on board, pun intended.

How will this play out?  I’m not sure, but for $10 to get a copy of the ebook, I figure it’s worth a look.  I don’t have the latest greatest Model B.  That shouldn’t matter, I’m just looking for a bridge to the Land O’ Pi.

Update…

Got the book, turns out it was a one day promo.  It goes back to the standard price 2 hours after this post is made public.  Sorry, but if you get it at standard price, the folks at Apress will be sure to entice you with future offerings.

The book starts out with some fundamentals on sensors, but it looks like the next section is what the book revolves around.  That being the XBee device.  I haven’t done anything with these devices for reasons of priority.  Now might be a good entry point for these devices.

I did some more digging around a couple of days since posting this and found out why XBee was selected for the book.  The wireless devices offer bridging.  This bridging can be between sensors and micro controllers, sensors and micro processors, or micro controllers and micro processors.  This is precisely what I was looking for.

There are many sources for instruction and demos available online and I found this one to be the most thorough and simple.