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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 t

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.

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.