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I...don't know about that. It's a computer, cool, but I think that most of the people who are looking for "fun" in computers are already finding it in things l
by blhack 15y ago
I...don't know about that.
It's a computer, cool, but I think that most of the people who are looking for "fun" in computers are already finding it in things like the Arduino.
Something I will hope for is that this disrupts some hobbyist economics. Things like the IOIO board from sparkfun (plugs into android, gives you 50 GPIO pins) are still really expensive ($50).
The arduino is too...$30 for a board that doesn't have wifi or any way of connecting to a network without an external card (shield).
The real holy grail of this stuff will be an arduino or a raspi with a wifi chip in it that costs $30 or less.
These little computers are all good, but when you have to tether them to something or buy an expensive add on to make them see the rest of the world, it kindof ruins the form factor for me.
- creativeembassy 15y agoBut I think this is the hope that everyone has for the Raspberry Pi. It has network connectivity, it's easy to program (HDMI port for audio and video, USB for keyboard and mouse), and (so far) it's easily expandable. I'm watching the GPIO video on their blog right now (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/500 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/500) and I can't wait until I can drop my Arduino set up and start programming in one of my preferred scripted (ruby) or functional (clojure) languages. I think it will make computers fun again.
- lgeek 15y agoI've tried something like that in the past - I've used ruby on Linux to program a robot, with I/O piped through an Arduino. It was painful. I've ran into lots of timing issues. The whole thing was incredibly unpredictable. Disabling the garbage collector improved things a little, but it's still annoying when your robot falls down because a cron job started. An RTOS is much more suitable if timing matters, and a language with a more predictable runtime helps as well.
- bitwize 15y agoforce a gc every time through the main sense-and-actuate loop of your control program it's a trick used by lisp game programmers -- there are a few games floating around the app store written in gambit scheme and they all do this to avoid gc pauses also why tf are you running cron jobs on your robot's computer? where i work we deploy linux robots all the time, we control the software loadout so shit like this doesn't happen
- lgeek 15y agoI should have started with a disclaimer: this was 3 years ago and I don't perfectly remember all the details. It was a system cron job, not one added by me. I think it was logrotate. I've removed it, but finding out what was happening wasn't that easy. Which was my point, with the whole thing being so unpredictable, debugging the system sucked.
- bitwize 15y agoLinux is hella predictable -- darned near real time -- if all it runs is your stack and especially if you set the process priority high enough. Next time start with a minimal system and build up, rather than starting with a fully-loaded system and trying to isolate and remove which of over 9000 processes kicked in to plage you with that slowdown. PROTIP: /sbin/init can be whatever the hell you want. Symlink it to /usr/bin/emacs and you have a poor man's Lisp machine. Oh, and uhh -- turn off swap. One of the reasons why I left Debian was that it takes a very kitchen-sink-included approach to a base system -- including, as I found out the hard way, things with unpleasant exploitable vulnerabilities. And it's hard for a person of ordinary Unix skills, not versed in Debian arcana, to pare it back to a manageable state. I'm an Arch man to this day for this reason.