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by wpietri 1667 days ago
What he did "cost me about $25 for the USB Dongle and roughly 30 minutes of time". How long would you estimate it would take a person unfamiliar with hardware to build the setup you had in mind?

I wanted a medication reminder with a blinking light for my partner so that it would come on at the right time and turn off when she took the meds. Could I have done it in pure hardware? Sure. But I bought a Raspberry Pi and we wrote the code together in Ruby because that was faster an easier. It in some sense was an egregious waste of computational capacity, and the parts cost could have been way lower. But it was also 50 bucks and it was using stuff we already knew. Even if I valued my time at minimum wage, "overdesign" was the optimal choice. And I definitely charge clients more than minimum wage.

1 comments

> How long would you estimate it would take a person unfamiliar with hardware to build the setup you had in mind?

10 minutes if you start from a code example.