Raspberry Pis are great little machines. A PC in a couple of inches of circuit board! They make it so easy to develop applications. What can you do with a computer that would fit in your show? Anything you want.

I have a pizza oven that I built myself. Part of the design involved being able to record temperatures. So I originally installed some thermocouples from eBay, and an arduino with a thermocouple shield. Arduinos are also fairly cool, but are a bit harder to deal with and more limited software wise. And everything is an expansion. So I had to buy an Ethernet shield to get network connectivity.

I wanted to set it up so that my computer inside could connect to the arduino and grab the temperatures. I never really got it to work. I could work it with the Arduino connecting to the internal server, but not theother way around. The arduino just kept locking up.

After a lot of fiddling I got my hands on a raspberry pi. This was more like it. A Linux machine! I know Linux! I still needed the arduino to run the thermocouples, but connected it to the raspberry pi using USB. The USB fed the power and also let me poll the temperature readings through the serial interface. And then a simple web app using Ruby Sinatra lets my internal machine poll the readings as needed. The data goes into a MySQL database and generates pretty graphs.

Anyway, back to the point. My raspberry pi has stopped working. It’s mounted on the back of my pizza over in a plastic box. When I turn the power on, I can ping it for around ten seconds and then it stops. So I’m going to need to pull it out and connect a monitor and see what’s happening.

The point of all this is that while implementing these things is fun, the more you use them for around your home, the more you end up spending your home time doing free IT support!.

The fun is all in the implementation. Once that’s over, supporting it is just a chore!