EVE Alpha - Raspberry Pi wireless development hardware | Hacker News Reader

EVE Alpha - Raspberry Pi wireless development hardware

kickstarter.com

33 pointscantlin11 comments

This is a very misleading Kickstarter. They open with a graphic containing logos for 10+ different wireless protocols (including WiFi!), but the board itself only supports a fraction of those. It has pads for two RFM12B module, a Z-Wave module, and an EnOcean module as well as a socket for an XBee module. They also included a few nice extras such as a real time clock and a temperature sensor.

However, you have to scroll to the bottom to see that the remaining "supported protocols" such as UMTS, 3G, 4G, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, X10, etc. are supported "via USB" or over the ethernet port. In other words, they have nothing to do with this project. You buy those adapters (separately) and plug them into any Raspberry Pi.

This looks like a decent PCB and case if you want to add an RFM12B, Z-Wave, EnOcean, or XBee module to your R-Pi and get a decent case, but they've stretched the marketing copy to include "support" for all of these unrelated protocols and features.

EDIT: As pointed out by unwind, this PCB has an include XBee header to support the addition of a Bluetooth, WiFi, or Zigbee module. If you're after these protocols CISECO (the company behind this kickstarter) has a £3.90 adapter board to connect these to the Pi: http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/slice-of-pi-add-on-for-raspberry-pi...

I think you're being a bit too negative. The hub has support for modules using the XBee form factor, and there are Bluetooth modules available for that form factor.

See http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/bluetooth-bee-p-598.html?cP... for a Bluetooth module.

See http://www.digi.com/products/wireless-wired-embedded-solutio... for a WiFi module in the XBee form factor (from the folks behind the original XBee).

This is pretty cool! The presentation was ... long, but I still failed to find some details I would have appreciated, just to get a better idea of what it does.

It's clear that it physically houses various wireless modules, but how does the connection "up" to the RPi work? I thought the RPi had pretty few I/O pins, so there must be some sort of multiplexing going on, I guess?

The presence of pure I2C components such as the thermometer and real-time clock hints that the hub talks to the RPi using I2C, but it would be nice to have some kind of schematic showing how it all fits together.

CISECO - Miles here, sorry guys if you found it confusing, we tried for days and over many many different people to get it right. I guess something right for everyone would have been war and peace and it's already too long.

The majority of the devices are SPI or I2C, the XBee socket being serial.

The schematics will be made available after the project ends.

There's only so much that can be fitted in the space without going USB. Where it makes more sense from cost or choice we left it USB, if that's not what people are after we are always here to listen.

£5-10 USB wifi or £20+ going SPI/UART, the choice I think is right.

It has nothing to do with EVE online

If the Pi isn't stable we will look to do a ground up Linux box, there's plenty to base things on. Our TI rep was too slow to get us what's under the Beagle, so Pi it was.

We hope the idea is seen as positive, those who don't, my suggestion is contribution is more effective than moaning ;)

We do bluetooth in XBee its called an XBT

It isn't immediately obvious to me what the Eve Alpha does. If I was to connect all my devices to a single bit of hardware what do I have now? Do I get a shared file system, or a specific service? I read a lot about the future of Eve but what do we get with the Alpha?

Their name makes me think there's some connection with EVE Online. I clicked the link because I thought it was the alpha version of some kind of RasPi EVE Online client.

I have to admit, the same thought occurred to me. This then made me wonder if they could even use the name EVE since EVE Online might have the trademark/copyright/whatever on that.

I too got pretty excited for a real-life Aura or NeoCom.

> EVE...Yes...Has the postman been?....Yes, at 9:13 this morning.
EVE...Yes...When did the cat last come in and has she much food?...23 minutes ago, there's over a quarter of a bowl full left.
EVE...put on the TV the last recorded image of the front gate....(picture on TV)
EVE..can you find out from Grandma's EVE if she's had her pills and if not to remind her.

EVE...can you set the heating to come on half an hour earlier in the mornings.

I hope someone at Apple pays attention to this and they start putting Zigbee to WiFi gateways into their products. Even a little box you attach to the router with an Ethernet cable would be dandy. Then they could create an ecosystem around peripherals and app developers. I'd want an SDK for Siri plugins, of course.

seems nice (well, except from that the description was quite unclear to me at first sight), but I won't pledge. My experience with the Raspberry hasn't been all that good (didn't work with any perihperals until bypassing the fuse, automounting stopped working out of the blue, wired network still drops sometimes, every now and then the attached hard disk is detached or starts givin I/O errors etc) so I don't even want to know what is going to happen when adding another peripheral like this board to it

I am supporting this Kickstarter because I see it as a good start point for a personal project to explore some OS ideas I have around a "swarm" of interconnected smart sensors with their own processing capabilities. I see this as a useful basis for an initial prototype that will take me beyond a software simulation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com