Building a weather station

A great project to work on is building a weather station. The Raspberry Pi 2 has so much processing power to offer:

• It can store a large amount of data in a database with ease

• It can be its own web server running with a variety of programming languages

• It can crunch numbers, create statistics, and eventually become nice graphs

• It can even stream live videos using WebRTC or RTSP

Real-time embedded devices

Atmel AVR (used on Arduino) and PICAXE are very well-known microcontrollers that run code with real-time precision. The advantage of these microcontrollers is that you can program them with simple code once, upload the code, disconnect them from the development board, and use them like a standalone IC.

Your initial cost for a development board maybe about the same as a Raspberry Pi on its own, but after this, getting the programmable Microcontr oller Unit (MCU) will cost a few dollars, and will be even cheaper for tiny versions.

There are expansion boards available for...