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Light or solenoid control between multiple Pis

anderson3250

I have a project I want to work on that would involve multiple Pis. I want to have them talk to each other via wifi/bluetooth with a main one with a display while the others each control a light or solenoid. Would this be possible with a bunch of Pis or would an arduino be the better option? Also would it be possible to daisy chain them so the main pi would know which state each pi would be in? Even if it is too far from the furthest unit? My experience so far has been with building the handheld emulators, so this is a big leap for me since those had walkthroughs. I'm thinking a Pi4 and a bunch of zeroes for the smaller units to reduce the cost.

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  • Hi Josh !

    It can all boil down to what are you more comfortable with.

     

    It doesn't need to be a Raspberry PI. To control a light or a solenoid probably an Arduino would be better:

    • less power consumtion
    • no problems with the SD card or not having a proper shutdown

     

    My solution would be to have a Raspberry PI with the display (the main one) and all the others being Arduinos or similar. You have arduinos with wifi and/or bluetooth - something that already comes with a Raspberry PI .

    You can make them send a kind of "heart-beat" every x seconds or minutes with it's status . If it's far from the furthest unit, it still possible, but that's a programming issue and not hardware related. You can program them to send a status to the closest unit and that unit sends both it's status and the other unit status to the next unit and so on and so on.. Like a mesh network. In my mind, that will only be a programming issue.

     

    Note: You can also make it work with RPI zeros', but if power could be an issue, or better off with arduinos

  • in reply to feiticeir0

    I never thought of mixing them together. Thank you, your explanation was very clear. I figured the programming would be my biggest hurdle in getting this to work.

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