If you are considering using the IoT to upgrade your home or office, you will want to consider which processor board to use. There are two commercially available options currently, Arduino board vs Raspberry Pi. Both are heavily used in the internet of things devices and development.

The scale and scope of the project will ultimately decide which board you use. Often times, they are used together. The Arduino board is good for handling simple processing tasks. They have very little memory and can get overloaded quite easily. These boards are excellent at reading things like temperature, humidity and executing basic code. On their own, Arduino boards do not typically have internet, Bluetooth or WiFi capabilities. 

Raspberry Pi boards, on the other hand, come standard with those connections. You can add cameras, sensors, Ethernet to both boards. Both of them have the ability to expand the memory, and require software to run. Raspberry Pi boards offer the most processing power and memory between the two. Arduino boards are open source, Raspberry Pi is not. They can both run on most operating systems and can be made compatible with any custom platform. 

Both of these boards use very low power and are efficient to run and use. Knowing what they do though is only part of the equation. Knowing how to use them both effectively is the key. Let’s use the example of a farmer. In the field, there are sensors on Arduino boards that record temperature, humidity and soil moisture. Arduino would send data to a Raspberry Pi controlled irrigation system. This would then water crops when dry and send an alert to the farmer.

What is Your Favorite Pi?

Trial and error are fine if you are doing a small, DIY at home project. The boards are both fairly cheap (under $50.00) and will afford you the time and energy to experiment. For a large scale operation, however, call in the professionals. You will get the expertise to know which boards to use, and when. A company like Digiteum, are a great example. After your project is analyzed, a plan will be created. This will typically include new hardware/software, database upgrades, increased network bandwidth among others. A network will be setup for the devices to communicate with each and perform the desired functions. In this instance, the boards may be the cheapest part of the project. However, once implemented there will be massive gains in automation, time and cost reduction, and process efficiency. These are the things that provide gains year after year after the initial investment is made.

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There was a certain irony in The Straight Pitch receiving its first PR pitch Tuesday. While I suppose there is a nugget of hope in the back of my mind I might one day qualify as a blogger people pitch story ideas to, the notion never really crossed my mind since I help provide pitching advice to PR folks.

But Tom from AppSmash (he gave no last name) sent me a very short and simple email (pasted below for reference). Guess what? It worked.

AppSmash has developed a professional networking application for Facebook that mirrors some of the functionality we’ve come to enjoy about LinkedIn. It’s called “What I do” and like other Facebook apps, it’s fairly quick and easy to install and gives you an option to invite friends. Early adopters (I’m assuming) have a chance at an iPhone drawing by inviting 10 or more.

You enter your basic professional information, keywords for your skills, can enter more detailed info about your company, invite others and there you go. Your information is entered (as an optional feature) in the application’s directory of professionals. You can search for others via keyword.

Another pseudo-LinkedIn feature is the ability to write a personal recommendation for your friends. It’s just a single line dialogue box, but gives you plenty of room for a paragraph or so of text. You are able to recommend any of your friends, regardless of their having the app installed. The system says it has saved the recommendation in their system.

Overall, it’s a very simple version of LinkedIn — no real depth of information about users whereas LinkedIn offers unlimited job history, awards, etc — but useful in the Facebook environment — No reason to have a separate listing of contacts since you have Facebook friends, I suppose.

The AppSmash website has a social media-esque release about the application that has more company-based information. The link to the application add is here: http://apps.facebook.com/whatido/

And for the record, though I could be admitting to an easy sell blogger and was flattered by the outreach, the simple approach worked for me. Here’s Tom’s email that led me to this post.

Hi Jason:

I just read your post about Facebook, Paul Gillin, etc. Our company just launched a facebook app that makes business networking on facebook simpler. It is already growing quickly and we have an article coming out with CMP tomorrow.

If you have any interest here is our press release – http://www.appsmash.com/news.html

Tom
www.appsmash.com

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