I will be starting to work on home/farm automation, and I'm trying to decide how I want to build the system.
Eventually, I would like a tablet permanently mounted on the wall near the house thermostat (or controlling the house HVAC...) that monitors everything over my home LAN, and where I can manually control and even catch real-time images/video.
General things I will need to do is run thermisters, run motors (maybe steppers), run actuators to open doors, sensors for this and that. Basic Arduino stuff.
But when I want to add video/pics into the mix and ethernet capability to have everything reporting to and controlled by a central server, I'm not sure.
I know that the central controller will be of Raspberry Pi, but the rest of it I'm still hung up over which way to go.
Raspberry Pi have built in ethernet/WiFi, some GPIOs and can easily handle any video needed. But they are $40+ each to get setup, but that doesn't include any drivers for motors or anything, and I don't know how they will stand up to MN winter temps (I have experience running 'duinos outside just fine). I can grab a clone MEGA+RAMPS and have all sorts of capabilities for running stuff and sensors for $20. Ethernet shields are $10. The MEGA is just super capable at doing microcontroller stuff, and extremely stable, and cheaper. I would actually be running CAT5 instead of WiFi as much as possible.
Power usage doesn't matter, they will all have access to mains.
Plus, I have experience coding for Arduino, I get to start again with a Pi :o
And on a related note, other than loosing X step & X direction on the RAMPS, any reason anybody knows of where I can't use a Mega/RAMPS/Ethernet combo?
Thoughts?