4 ms·

"This turnkey off the shelf product isn't all that hard to do yourself-- just buy the components, make your own PCBs, do some surface mount soldering, then writ

"This turnkey off the shelf product isn't all that hard to do yourself-- just buy the components, make your own PCBs, do some surface mount soldering, then write all your own software, including the wireless mesh network stack."

derefr 9y ago
I think the GP comment was intended in the sense that it's trivial for someone who does this for a living as an employee of a hardware product company to get this sort of power-draw out of bog-standard components; they weren't suggesting that it's an easy DIY project.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  Well sure, a hardware company isn't going to buy this. Check their pricing page. http://www.thingsquare.com/start/ http://www.thingsquare.com/start/ This is the Arduino business model-- easy introductory hardware for beginners. An actual hardware company wouldn't buy these for the same reason a router company wouldn't buy Cisco hardware and tape over the logos: there wouldn't be any margin. I would characterize GGP's argument as more that this isn't unprecedented, and again, sure. Lithium cell-powered electronics have been around for decades, adding wireless isn't new. The point is that thingsquare is supposed to be easy. You buy their kit and press a button. You don't need to buy individual parts, or do assembly, or write glue code, or know what I2C is. This is a common disease of the engineer's mind. "Why does anybody buy a car new? Just buy one used, and replace parts yourself when they break! Heck, why buy parts, when they're just metal and electronics? It should be easy enough to do your own aluminum casting, and wind your own electric motors." "You fool, you buy aluminum? Bauxite is everywhere! Just smelt it yourself, it's not hard." Etc etc.
  - Hasz 9y ago
    I wasn't trying to suggest breaking out the sputtering chamber, but anyone with a decent background in physics and basic algebra could learn and build something similar. My only argument for doing so is that everything is now extendable, whereas a "thingsquare' locks you into some particular engineer's design decisions that made sense then, but won't make sense for every use case now. Arduino sits right in the sweet spot of "easy to get off the ground" and extendable enough to use for all kinds of things", and that's largely why it is successful as a platform. This product sits so far off into "easy to get off the ground" territory that it misses too many use cases. A board like this could be spun up for $25, shipping, parts, software, all in. I would be amazed (and very interested) if you could get an aluminum smelter up and running for $20.
dkersten 9y ago
If the sizes of the components aren’t too small, creating a custom PCB and doing surface mount soldering is not that hard. With that said, of course the entire thing is still a lot of work and if the parts are super tiny... well...
pjc50 9y ago
I believe he's not suggesting writing your own stack for the ESP, just keep it powered off 99.9% of the time. The rest is just basic electronics.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  The ESP does self-healing mesh stuff out of the box?
  - trelliscoded 9y ago
    https://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-mesh/overview https://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-mesh/overview It's not exactly self-healing in the same way 802.11s is, iirc it's your basic distance-vector routing protocol with all the usual problems that has.
foldr 9y ago
> just buy the components, make your own PCBs, do some surface mount soldering, then write all your own software All of these except the last are surprisingly easy these days. Digikey and Mouser stock virtually everything, custom PCBs are easy to order, and surface mount soldering can be done with a cheap hot air gun or toaster oven.
- Hasz 9y ago
  You're exactly right. You can get a 10cm by 10cm 2 layer board with 6mil tolerances for $12 shipped, from china. Arrow will ship parts overnight with a minimum order size of $20. Aliexpress/eBay have made discrete semiconductors and passive parts nearly free. Writing a bit of software is incredibly easy (versus what it used to be) with a good IDE and a solid toolchain. It's truly a great age to be involved in hardware.
  - stingrae 9y ago
    > a good IDE and a solid toolchain This area is in much need of improvement. Keil ARM-MDK, IAR, ect. aren't cheap.
    - mianos 9y ago
      But platform.io is good and cheap. You can do most things with the free version and the pro version with remote debugging is pretty reasonable. The plus is, even though it is based around Atom, it's not a 20G download, as the vendor IDEs are.
      - foldr 9y ago
        Just a note for anyone else who's interested. The site is platformio.org, not platform.io.
    - sampullman 9y ago
      GCC for ARM is pretty great these days, although I can only vouch for it on Cortex-M. I think the code generation is on par with or better than IAR/Keil in most cases, and it's much nicer to use Intellij/VSCode/etc instead of mucking around with dated vendor IDEs. https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm

derefr 9y ago

I think the GP comment was intended in the sense that it's trivial for someone who does this for a living as an employee of a hardware product company to get this sort of power-draw out of bog-standard components; they weren't suggesting that it's an easy DIY project.

sbierwagen 9y ago
Well sure, a hardware company isn't going to buy this. Check their pricing page. http://www.thingsquare.com/start/ http://www.thingsquare.com/start/ This is the Arduino business model-- easy introductory hardware for beginners. An actual hardware company wouldn't buy these for the same reason a router company wouldn't buy Cisco hardware and tape over the logos: there wouldn't be any margin. I would characterize GGP's argument as more that this isn't unprecedented, and again, sure. Lithium cell-powered electronics have been around for decades, adding wireless isn't new. The point is that thingsquare is supposed to be easy. You buy their kit and press a button. You don't need to buy individual parts, or do assembly, or write glue code, or know what I2C is. This is a common disease of the engineer's mind. "Why does anybody buy a car new? Just buy one used, and replace parts yourself when they break! Heck, why buy parts, when they're just metal and electronics? It should be easy enough to do your own aluminum casting, and wind your own electric motors." "You fool, you buy aluminum? Bauxite is everywhere! Just smelt it yourself, it's not hard." Etc etc.
- Hasz 9y ago
  I wasn't trying to suggest breaking out the sputtering chamber, but anyone with a decent background in physics and basic algebra could learn and build something similar. My only argument for doing so is that everything is now extendable, whereas a "thingsquare' locks you into some particular engineer's design decisions that made sense then, but won't make sense for every use case now. Arduino sits right in the sweet spot of "easy to get off the ground" and extendable enough to use for all kinds of things", and that's largely why it is successful as a platform. This product sits so far off into "easy to get off the ground" territory that it misses too many use cases. A board like this could be spun up for $25, shipping, parts, software, all in. I would be amazed (and very interested) if you could get an aluminum smelter up and running for $20.

dkersten 9y ago

If the sizes of the components aren’t too small, creating a custom PCB and doing surface mount soldering is not that hard. With that said, of course the entire thing is still a lot of work and if the parts are super tiny... well...

pjc50 9y ago

I believe he's not suggesting writing your own stack for the ESP, just keep it powered off 99.9% of the time. The rest is just basic electronics.

sbierwagen 9y ago
The ESP does self-healing mesh stuff out of the box?
- trelliscoded 9y ago
  https://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-mesh/overview https://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-mesh/overview It's not exactly self-healing in the same way 802.11s is, iirc it's your basic distance-vector routing protocol with all the usual problems that has.

foldr 9y ago

> just buy the components, make your own PCBs, do some surface mount soldering, then write all your own software All of these except the last are surprisingly easy these days. Digikey and Mouser stock virtually everything, custom PCBs are easy to order, and surface mount soldering can be done with a cheap hot air gun or toaster oven.

Hasz 9y ago
You're exactly right. You can get a 10cm by 10cm 2 layer board with 6mil tolerances for $12 shipped, from china. Arrow will ship parts overnight with a minimum order size of $20. Aliexpress/eBay have made discrete semiconductors and passive parts nearly free. Writing a bit of software is incredibly easy (versus what it used to be) with a good IDE and a solid toolchain. It's truly a great age to be involved in hardware.
- stingrae 9y ago
  > a good IDE and a solid toolchain This area is in much need of improvement. Keil ARM-MDK, IAR, ect. aren't cheap.
  - mianos 9y ago
    But platform.io is good and cheap. You can do most things with the free version and the pro version with remote debugging is pretty reasonable. The plus is, even though it is based around Atom, it's not a 20G download, as the vendor IDEs are.
    - foldr 9y ago
      Just a note for anyone else who's interested. The site is platformio.org, not platform.io.
  - sampullman 9y ago
    GCC for ARM is pretty great these days, although I can only vouch for it on Cortex-M. I think the code generation is on par with or better than IAR/Keil in most cases, and it's much nicer to use Intellij/VSCode/etc instead of mucking around with dated vendor IDEs. https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm