Why a Rasp and not a ESP?

[jor3l]

Just wondering why this approach, this should be simple enough to use any app that reads BLE and put the UI together

[laberning]

Well, I guess both a microcontroller and a full blown computer can work as rowing monitor.

In fact this project for a rowing monitor started on an Arduino microcontroller, connected to a LCD shield. That worked pretty well and there are also other projects out there that use a microcontroller for getting metrics from a rowing machine (like ErgWare).

A Raspberry Pi 3 was the only spare device with BLE hardware that I had lying around at that time, so that was basically the reason why I chose it 😄.

At that time I thought going with a full OS was a bit of an overkill, but the nice part of it is, that it gives room and plenty of resources for adding new features that would be much harder to do on a microcontroller.
I.e. there is already support for USB ANT+ sticks (for heart rate devices), creation of raw data files and training sessions on the device, a GUI rendered directly on the device with the full rendering capabilities of a browser, network shares for accessing data and other stuff...

But yes, if you just want to create a device that transforms the measurements of a rowing machine into BLE GATT, that should also be possible with a microcontroller. Are you planning to build something like that?

[jor3l]

I think is nice to have addons and being able to put all that together, I just don't see my rowing to be that super smart lol, you can always have the rasp read from the rowing BLE and have more stuff connected to it, the same way a phone app could do this. I do plan on making this with a ESP32, was first looking around for projects and seeing if this is something that has been implemented already, I might take some stuff from yours so I'll let you know