Best place to purchase Pi-Zero wireless.

Forums › Gadgets, robotics, home automation, electronics (including wearables) › Best place to purchase Pi-Zero wireless.

JeremyNzl

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#237818 19-Jun-2018 13:52

Hi Guys

Looking at a project to monitor temperatures in coolrooms via external sensor and Snmp.

Can anybody recommend the preferable place to source Pi's from nz or international,

Looking for 5, with cases or bits and pieces to make them operable.

Thanks

Jeremy

michaelmurfy

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#2040458 19-Jun-2018 14:09

@hads from Nicegear (https://nicegear.nz) may be able to help out however have you considered even the ESP8266 + sensors?

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hads

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#2040497 19-Jun-2018 14:21

Thanks @michaelmurfy

There's currently nowhere in NZ to buy a Pi Zero W. I've been trying to convince the Raspberry Pi Foundation to let us sell them here for ages but no luck yet. I've actually been talking to them since before the original Pi was released, so it's fair to say it's been a while :)

That said, if it were me I'd probably go with what @michaelmurfy said and use something more "bare metal" for a temperature sensor node. I personally find running an operating system on that sort of thing to be more maintenance hassle than it's worth unless it's doing something quite a bit more than reporting a statistic or activating an ouput.

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davidcole

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#2040508 19-Jun-2018 14:43

Yeah I'd go d1 minis with a dht12 sensor, and write a simple homie based firmware. Easy to roll out the same firmware code to all of them.

The disadvantage (and it would be present for PI Zeros as well) is needing power for each one.

Another even geekier option is something like The bluemaestro option I had a blog post for: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/davidcole/8931 But this works out expensive as well (£24) + a raspberry pi for a communication gateway.

Though I did see a way of doing similar, bluetooth devices + a "gateway" where the devices were about $5 for a BLE device and you add the same DHT12 sensor and put your own code on it.

A zwave option would be about $100 per device + power (though they can run battery as well).

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hads

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#2040519 19-Jun-2018 14:57

If it were me I'd go with a more advanced sensor than the DHT, they're okay but there are more accurate and repeatable sensors out there.

Another option for a micro is the Particle devices.

If you can deal with being on their semi-proprietary system then it's management capabilities are awesome. Personally I can deal with it because even though there's a non-free aspect to it you can still get down and dirty with the hardware and program it from a Makefile if you want to but you also have the ability to use their online platform and do firmware versioning, OTA rollout, remote debugging and other fun things.

The current range is WiFi/3G only so would still need power at each node, however the main reason I decided to mention it is that they're currently working on their third generation hardware which is mesh capable and will support sleepy sensors hence the possibility for battery powered nodes.

Disclaimer: I sell this stuff and this reads kind of like an ad but I sell a lot of stuff and have no particular commercial bias, I just like cool solutions.

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davidcole

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#2040525 19-Jun-2018 15:03

Have you seen this? http://www.instructables.com/id/LoRa-Tooth-Small-Wireless-Sensors/

That's the BLE + sensor method I was talking about. Could be quite cost effective if you were doing a whole house.

JeremyNzl

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#2040755 19-Jun-2018 20:46

Thanks for the input guys,

I was looking and am still keen on the zero's as i have got the basics of ssh and linux basic networking and have a solid wifi coverage and feel more comfortable in that space, than rolling my own firmware.

I will be using external probes and wanting points of degrees for measuring. cooled water/glycol and coolrooms.

Probably on ptrg to get going. Then hopefully if I could build a grafana dashboard once my skills develop

The bluetooth sensors for my house would be a secondary project using the d1's which look cool but I want to dip my feet in with some relatable code as above.

Thanks Hads I had not been on nicegear.co.nz and will keep it in mind for projects

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hio77

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#2040774 19-Jun-2018 21:36

davidcole:

Have you seen this? http://www.instructables.com/id/LoRa-Tooth-Small-Wireless-Sensors/

That's the BLE + sensor method I was talking about. Could be quite cost effective if you were doing a whole house.

If you were to go this route, Lora over sparks network could be a good option..

sadly i'm still waiting for a lora node to come out as far my way!

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davidcole

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#2040777 19-Jun-2018 21:46

hio77:
davidcole:

Have you seen this? http://www.instructables.com/id/LoRa-Tooth-Small-Wireless-Sensors/

That's the BLE + sensor method I was talking about. Could be quite cost effective if you were doing a whole house.

If you were to go this route, Lora over sparks network could be a good option..

sadly i'm still waiting for a lora node to come out as far my way!

I wouldn’t send anything out via internet. I like all my stuff local only. The only things I expose are some ui elements via apples homekit

spmiller

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#2040792 19-Jun-2018 22:46

When I was looking for a Pi Zero W, the cheapest place was an outfit called Kiwi Electronics... based in the Netherlands!

It was about €12 delivered. They seem to have changed their shipping methods to only allow UPS for NZ; previously there was a PostNL method which was super cheap. It's still available for Australia. You'd probably be able to contact them and request they add it back; I asked them to add NZ as a country option and they did it within a day.

richms

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#2040815 20-Jun-2018 00:01

If its your own wifi network or you can put your own SSID on it then the esp8266's lack of TLS isnt really much of an issue since you can keep it on your own lan and others off it. There are so many things about running your own mqtt broker on a pi and then the sensors sending to it. Andreas Spiess on youtube has a tonne of stuff thats worth a look.

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hads

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#2040887 20-Jun-2018 09:40

richms:

If its your own wifi network or you can put your own SSID on it then the esp8266's lack of TLS isnt really much of an issue since you can keep it on your own lan and others off it. There are so many things about running your own mqtt broker on a pi and then the sensors sending to it. Andreas Spiess on youtube has a tonne of stuff thats worth a look.

That's a great point. A good way of doing this that I've used in the past (and still do for a bunch of our home automation) is to connect over clear text MQTT with dumb endpoints that can't do TLS and then use the bridge functionality of mosquitto to connect out to another broker on the Internet using TLS. This achieves both the goal of local control continuing to function without an active Internet connection and security over the public 'net.

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Varkk

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#2040895 20-Jun-2018 09:50

If still looking for the Zero W I recently bought one from Australia from these guys https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/ Although if I did it again I would buy the Zero WH and get more than one as the shipping was more than the actual device. It seems the Zero with no header is still only available in single units but the model with the header attached has no limit.