Why is LiV using Raspberry Pi and not Arduino?

[AlfredC]

This is a question I got quite a few times:
Why are you using Raspberry Pi for this project? Why not Arduino or some other embedded board? After all, LiV reads some sensors and displays measurements on an LCD screen. Do you really need Raspberry Pi and Linux to do that?

For displaying sensor measurements on an LCD screen, a light-weight embedded system is obviously the right choice. Android is such a wonderful environment for this kind of applications!

LiV however, does much more than that:

LiV is an Internet connected device (WiFi and wired Ethernet).

LiV offers you a home intranet website with data visualization for air quality measurements.

LiV offers a set of JSON APIs so that you can access measurements data in whatever app or website you develop. As a developer, you can easily add new APIs with Python Flask.

You can connect LiV to an HDMI input of your TV set, start a web browser in kiosk mode on LiV and have an air indoor quality channel available on your TV set.

You can retrieve indoor air quality measurements with an instant messaging app that runs on your cellphone or laptop and supports Jabber/XMPP protocol. (e.g. pigin, chatsecure).

In addition to all these, LiV is designed to be used as a technical education tool. There are a lot of young developers who are comfortable doing web site development under Linux: these programmers are already using or are interested to learn Python, but they would shy away from touching low level C code that deals with accessing sensor data. It is this younger developer audience that we had in mind when we started our work on LiV: we wanted to create a friendly programming environment for them.

When you take into consideration all the capabilities listed here, using a Linux box like Raspberry Pi starts to make sense.