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Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

That's really where I burnt the first 4 weeks of this exercise. I would go on those sites, read blogs/posts/product pages over and over, and get overwhelmed and just shut down based on the number of options.

Probably a personal character fault. You're right that it is overkill. And I'll probably be tossing some more money towards SparkFun soon too - but the just from being a pure-software guy to buying/assembling the raw parts just shut me down :-(

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> I would go on those sites, read blogs/posts/product pages over and over, and get overwhelmed and just shut down based on the number of options.

Welcome to engineering. Pick one and finish the project. Then look back.

Yes, running an RPi Zero to watch a button press is overkill. So what? It optimizes delivery time over efficiency. You can optimize for cost or power later if you feel like it.

Anyhow, nice job.

You know what? That's totally ok. When I first heard of the raspi platform that was what I found most exciting. It was going to take a whole world of people with common web dev skills and kick the door open for them to get into hardware. I'm glad to see that's it's completely living up to that promise.

Nooo, that's the fun part! Here's how I did it, from a pure-software guy to... that:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/

It's a shame that you have to defend "buying something to learn how to use it", even if it's a bit overkill for the current use.

At some point you'll want to use the Pi Zero for something else, and at that point you'll be able to use some other IoT package.

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