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A whole ass pi just for that?!

What would you have used ten years ago?

ESP8266 came out 2014, around the same time as the first Pi, besides the myriad of wifi enabled uc options before that. First Arduino (let's say for ease of use) with wifi built in was 2013.

Lmao people already getting mad. It's honestly just way simpler doing something like that with a microcontroller/realtime rather than a pi running all sorts of processes/reboots/sd card issues etc.

Perhaps a pi is what they had on hand. It sounds as though this wasn’t a project that was planned in advance.

Sometimes you just use what you have.

Oh yeah for sure and if they had come back with "oh yeah we only had that" (they did) I would've been like "ah okay makes sense!"

But for people to react negatively to my comment in the first place is hilarious and predictable human behaviour. Honestly it doesn't really necessitate explanation, imo.

We had to come up with something wireless for authentication as we did not want to install anything visible like RFID readers. We also had a few Pis lying around.

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