“Can a $35 computer persuade kids to put down their smartphones and try their hands at programming?” That’s the question Simson Garfinkel wants to answer in his review of the Raspberry Pi. So this is not a technical review, with benchmarks and comparisons with similar hardware. Basically, it’s just about a father who wants to know whether a small but complete computer can keep his kids interested and get them tinkering with software (and possibly with the hardware as well). His conclusion: the current software version needs an upgrade to be truly compelling for such a young audience.
I was reading this review while sitting in my “office”, which also houses the remote display panel of our solar panel installation on the roof. That explains why I suddenly started thinking about using a Pi to monitor the energy production of our solar panels. The Pi has low power consumption (much less, I hope, than the old Pentium PC that lingers in a dark corner). It has a USB port to connect to the SMA Sunny Beam display. It runs Linux, and thus it should be able to gets the numbers every hour and drop them into a database, from which they can be read in a web app or web service. There’s a lot of talk about the Python programming language in the Pi community, and I have a Python script to read my Sunny Beam… When I write it down like this, it should be dead easy, right?
