6 months or so ago I was busy playing with the Pi as a gateway, reading info in via serial from a few nodes every 1 min, writing to disk constantly, etc, killed the sd card with too many writes after 2+ months running I think, at least caused the pi to fall over.  Over the years had other issues like this with the PI so decided it was time to try something different (lots of ways I could have continue to use the Pi, but wanted to try a new "cheaper" board).

Went down the road of the Omega 2 this past week.  Smaller footprint, built in storage.  Thou  you need to buy a base for it, which sucks (as does their .2mm pin setup), but after 2 days of playing with it so far, much happier using it as a gateway with a whisper node feeding it than I was with the Pi.

In both cases just feeding it via serial, the difference on the Omega 2 is that it has multiple UART's, in this case ttyS0 and ttyS1, instead of just S0 that is tied to the console and on the Pi was a bit of a pain to go in and shut off for use this way.  

One gotcha with the Omega 2 and serial though is feeding it at 115200 doesn't seem to work, it starts missing char reads.  Not sure where the sweet point is, but just dropped it down to 9600 which works fine for my app.

Love the serial out on the whisper node and just wanted to point out there are other things that may make a good gateway besides just the pi.

Hi Xnih13,

Thanks for sharing it. Would you mind sharing where you bought the Omega 2 from and maybe a picture of your gateway setup?

Are you using Python to read the messages arriving on the Serial port?

Thanks!

You can pick them up off of amazon, which is what I did, since with free shipping there it ended up being a little cheaper than directly from the vendor with the pieces/parts I was ordering and their S/H, otherwise you can get them and learn more about them here:  https://onion.io/omega2/

The dock that it is in the picture is their middle size one, with an ethernet expansion plugged into it (not needed if you want to use wireless, but I prefer wired).  I picked up their uno layout board as well, which should be compatible with any uno shields, personally if I had it to do again I probably wouldn't have done that, but it will be nice to have around, just in case.  They also have another base, the mini, that is just a little bigger than the omega2, but it doesn't have any expansion pins, so you'd have to do a usb/serial cable or solder straight to it most likely.

The omega2 is about 3/4'sthat of the whisper node, look to be the same width.

I have 2 of them now, in both cases I had trouble getting wireless to work off the bat with my router, one eventually seemed to work fine, the other not sure, but again I like having a wired port, so haven't troubleshot that a lot.  One thing nice with the mini and normal expansion dock is they have the serial chip on them, so you can open a comm terminal into them when you power them up from your PC.

And yes, I'm using python to read the serial port info coming in on the omega2.