On Thursday, 21 January 2021 09:25:02 GMT Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
> This is a very interesting product. That said, I agree with you Terry in
> that I think it would have been hard to even get Ethernet to work with
> something like this, let alone talking to a MySQL database - probably
> unsuitable for the River System, or at least the direction it went in
> given the hardware we had at the time.
At the time, there was no thought of networking the devices; this was when I
did the lighting controller. This would have been perfect for that because in
the end I was unable to get PWM to work without flickering using Python because
the GPIO Library didn't (doesn't?) support the hardware PWM on Pin 18. I got
it working with WiringPi and C, although the C code is hardly rocket science
with only around 160 lines of code around a third of which are comments.
The train controllers would have been a perfect choice for this , but I
couldn't have used it for any of the four audio players on the site. I agree
with you that we certainly would have struggled to develop the software for
the River System in its present form.
From a hardware standpoint we would have been fine for any of the River System
devices if USB networking could be made to work. If I were starting today, I
would seriously consider using a Pi Zero at each location to do the grunt
work, connected to the Pico's using USB Networking, like I've just done on the
new Minster hardware.
--
Terry Coles
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