Arduino or Raspberry Pi custom Sensor

Hardware
1

Hello,

I was looking at supported devices for home assistant and was looking at how to make a custom sensor. Basically what I’m going for is a sensor to read accelerometer data. I want to put this sensor on a pull behind camper and when I get to my campsite I can look at my phone/tablet and see how level my trailer is. I didn’t see any good tutorials on making your own sensors with custom outputs.

Thanks!

2

I am pretty much interested in this thread as well. Though I have another hardware to consider, ESP8266 NodeMCU boards. I am afraid I didn’t get your use case of the sensor very clearly. However, in general, people are using a sensor (for readings) + Processor (for processing the data and make ready for sending to the receiver) + Some sort of radio module (could be RF 433MHz,2.4GHz or WiFi or even ethernet) and finally the gateway (to receive/compile the data).

https://www.mysensors.org/ is a site where you can get a decent idea of this sort of stuff in general. However, they mostly deal with the Arduino boards as the remote processor board so user has to choose another gateway and RF modules for Rx/Tx which is a bit overkill after discovering the fact that boards like ESP8266 can process the sensor data (via GPIO) and directly send the data using its builtin WiFi Chip. And most importantly, smart people out there written several firmware for this chip so that the whole process can be made damn easy.

So from here, personally I had discarded the Arduino option rather included the new option RPi Zero W along with NodeMCU chips. With ESPEasy firmware I believe the build process of sensor network with NodeMCU became decent enough. But still I am feeling like RPi zero W could be really be useful in building a super sensor node which would combine 3/4 sensors altogether.

So my question to the DIYers,

  1. which is the better option you think for making a super sensor Node ? NodeMCU or pi zero W ?

  2. And what would be the winner for a single sensor node (e.g. only single motion sensor ).

  3. Which would be the better choice in case of battery usage ?

By the way, the protocol of choice to me is MQTT for this kind of tasks. Personally I think MQTT is the most versatile protocol for IoT till date.