Your rig hardware options

You have several options for hardware:

  1. The most recommended rig has been an Edison + Explorer Board. Unfortunately Intel stopped making the Edison boards as of 2018. If you can find an Intel Edison (eBay, local stores, etc - this is still very possible), this is still a highly recommmended rig. It is the smallest rig (and easily portable), with better battery life because it is power efficient. Go here for the list of hardware and setup instructions for Edison setups.
  2. The other option is a Raspberry Pi-based setup, with the new Explorer HAT. This rig setup makes it easier to see information when offline because it has an onboard screen for displaying readouts. Go here for hardware required and setup instructions for Pi/HAT setups. There is also an experimental alternative to an Explorer HAT, RFM69HCW, which can serve as the radio on a Pi-based rig, but will not have the screen, and requires you to solder.
  3. Yet another option is a Raspberry Pi-based setup, with an Adafruit RFM69HCW Bonnet. This rig setup makes it easier to see information when offline because it has a small onboard screen for displaying readouts, but it does not come with charging hardware for a battery like the Explorer HAT or Explorer Board. You will need to build your own charging circuit or use a USB power block if you want to make this rig portable. However, this makes an excellent stationary or backup rig! See here for the list of hardware required for Pi/Bonnet setups.
  4. (Not recommended, but supported) There is an experimental alternative to prefabricated hardware on the Raspberry Pi (Explorer HAT or Adafruit Bonnet), which can serve as the radio on a Pi-based rig, but will not have the screen and requires you to solder. See here for the list of hardware required for more details on a setup with RFM69HCW breakout board.
  5. (Not recommended, but supported) If you already have a USB TI stick (from an older rig build), you can continue using it in 0.7.0 if you reflash it with new firmware and wire it to the SPI header on the Raspberry Pi. See here for the instructions on how to re-flash and re-wire your TI stick.

What happens if you have multiple rigs?

If you have multiple OpenAPS rigs, they’re built to be polite to each other. Even if you had two or more rigs in same room, they won’t trip each other up. They “wait for silence” before issuing any commands to the pump. By having multiple rigs throughout a house, you can move from room-to-room without carrying rigs because the rigs will pass-off comms as you moves in and out of the rig’s range. Stationary rigs will not need LiPo batteries and can be plugged directly into a wall charger from the Explorer board.

Just like multiple Edison rigs play well together, an Edison and a Pi rig can also work fine side by side. As always, best practice is to make sure they’re in the same feature set - don’t have one type of rig using SMB’s if the other hardware has an old code version that isn’t aware of SMB’s.

​