Essentially, the parent article was discussing how they broke out the soldering iron and learned about wireless integrated circuits. At a large enough scale, it makes great sense to do this engineering work: design a PCB with power supplies and analog circuits, figure out connections to peripheral sensors, put that PCB and sensors into an injection-molded piece of plastic, add fasteners and brackets to mount sensors, install connectors and terminate wires on the sensors and boards, write assembly and C code to make them all talk to each other
...taking on all the overhead.
But for a lot of small runs of equipment, this doesn't make sense. Buy the strain gauge already in an enclosure with standardized interfaces and built-in amplifiers, get a small computer (PLC) that's already in an enclosure and has terminals to connect to those sensors, write code in a high-level language designed for talking to sensors, and ship it.
It's like somebody wanted to build a website, so they started digging into network protocols. There's a place for that, but it should be approached long after you've fired up a Wordpress instance.
Essentially, the parent article was discussing how they broke out the soldering iron and learned about wireless integrated circuits. At a large enough scale, it makes great sense to do this engineering work: design a PCB with power supplies and analog circuits, figure out connections to peripheral sensors, put that PCB and sensors into an injection-molded piece of plastic, add fasteners and brackets to mount sensors, install connectors and terminate wires on the sensors and boards, write assembly and C code to make them all talk to each other ...taking on all the overhead.
But for a lot of small runs of equipment, this doesn't make sense. Buy the strain gauge already in an enclosure with standardized interfaces and built-in amplifiers, get a small computer (PLC) that's already in an enclosure and has terminals to connect to those sensors, write code in a high-level language designed for talking to sensors, and ship it.
It's like somebody wanted to build a website, so they started digging into network protocols. There's a place for that, but it should be approached long after you've fired up a Wordpress instance.