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by sprobertson 4386 days ago
> it would be interesting to know if one can reproduce all Tessel capabilites with a Pi + extensions.

You can, I've had a Node-on-Pi based home automation system running for a few months now. It looks like Tessel's main advantage is the plug & play nature of their modules.
1 comments
vikramhaer 4386 days ago
That sounds awesome, any details on what kind of setup you have on the Pi for home automation? Would love to try and setup something similar!
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sprobertson 4385 days ago
It currently consists of a bunch of single purpose modules, some output (light switch and door lock via GPIO, music player, notification sender, etc.), some input (SMS via Twilio, Github webhooks, web interface, etc.), and a central broker. They're all communicating by sending JSON messages over ZeroMQ sockets. Each module connects to and registers with the broker, which keeps track of module health with heartbeats, and routes and schedules commands based on the modules' registered handlers.

It's less complicated than it might sound, I've got some (unorganized, undocumented) code up at https://github.com/spro/drsproboto if you want to take a peek.

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