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Hardware Selection

A project log for Zombie Plop

The un-dead drop.

t0x0t0x0 08/20/2014 at 08:090 Comments

The hardware selection phase has begun. As with most development projects, we're balancing trade-offs. The Texas Instruments CC430 is ideal for this project, but we'd like to go with the most open and community friendly hardware design possible. The Parallax Propeller family would give us some hefty processing ability, especially with its multiple cores, but the timeline would suffer due to our lack of familiarity with the development environment. Arduino is an obvious choice, inexpensive and quite popular also. It's an open design, easy to develop on, and is ubiquitous in this community. This provides familiarity for anyone else wanting to develop for or extend this design and should make prototype design quick and as painless as possible. The downsides to Arduino include a slower MCU and no onboard wireless.

At this point, development will move forward with an Arduino platform as the core of the project and a Bluetooth 4 Low Energy dev board from Adafruit. Unfortunately, we don't have enough information yet to make a permanent determination on whether that will be the final design. The initial hardware selection phase has effectively been a failure, although we have a lot more information to work with over the next few weeks...

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