Performance Evaluation of Raspberry Pi as an IoT Edge Signal Processing Device for a Real-Time Flash Flood Forecasting System

Abstract

The Raspberry Pi has evolved in recent years into a popular, low-cost, tiny computer for a wide range of IoT applications. Raspberry Pi is not only successful for data collection but also for data processing, including data storage and analysis. Thus, this study investigates the capability of Raspberry Pi as an edge processing device for capturing lightning strike signals in predicting flash flood locations. An electric and magnetic sensor (EMS) is connected to a Raspberry Pi in the experiment setup. The Raspberry Pi is then used to process digitised lightning signals. From the experiment, Raspberry Pi’s performance is measured using the performance metrics: central processing unit (CPU) usage and temperature. The results revealed that the Raspberry Pi could handle the real-time collection and processing of lightning signals from the EMSs without affecting the hardware capability.