One of my kids has a like-minded teacher who is in to automation/3d printing/maker stuff, just like me, so I thought it would be great to get my daughters in to electronics and home automation stuff by guiding them through building a home automation doll house that very much will mimic the functionality of our own home. I just need some guidance in wrapping my around the best way to do this; I would like to run everything off of a pi and will utilize single RGB LEDs for pretty much all of the lights (aside from some outdoor xmas lights I am thinking of making out of an LED strip). I will also make use of magnetic reed switches on the doors, a pi camera at the front door, PIR sensors, a speaker, etc. Therefore, I have the following questions:
- Will the Raspberry Pi’s GPIOs be enough to handle my sensor/light requirements? Or, will I need to utilzie some ESP8266 chips and connect everything with MQTT?
- Can the Pi just create its own hotspot. letting me connect a tablet to it for controlling everything? I want to keep it simple and contained and not have to worry about connecting to the school’s wifi or anything.
Please share any ideas you have, this project is in its infancy and I can see it exploding in scope once we get started.
