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I like where we're headed with these sorts of devices coming out. There appears to be some serious demand for powerful and tiny computing devices that are cheap

I like where we're headed with these sorts of devices coming out. There appears to be some serious demand for powerful and tiny computing devices that are cheap enough to almost be considered disposable. This makes them perfect for weekend projects that require a little more umph than a typical Arduino can handle (and in some cases, like the Raspberry Pi's, they can even be cheaper). I'm excited to see what the future brings in this nook of the technology/hobbyist industry.

digikata 14y ago
For embedded computing, the thing that makes a board nice to work with is good documentation (board schematics and full datasheets/reference manuals), access to the hardware, and consistent behavior. In the $20-$200 range, there's lots of choices with more power than an Arduino. I understand there's excitement about Raspberry Pi because it's particular performance is closer to what ~$200 range boards were delivering for Raspberry's @25/$35. That's really a very nice achievement, but I'm cautious to see what degree of access to hardware will be possible over time. It might be well worth an extra cost, or giving up some performance if I'm getting additional time to do cool stuff vs. spending time reverse engineering capability that could have been accessed by reading datasheets.
themgt 14y ago
I think a way to bridge Arduino shields up to a normal general purpose computing environment at a reasonable cost (e.g. http://omer.me/2012/05/introducing-ponte/ http://omer.me/2012/05/introducing-ponte/) will be the true killer app for hardware hacking. Being able to write lua/python/ruby/etc to talk directly to hardware & sensors will be incredibly powerful There's no way long-term Arduino is going to stay at it's current specs & environment, any more than TI-89 calculators could
- ballooney 14y ago
  Don't underestimate the usefulness of hard real time io that's easy to implement. It's nice being able to be able to guarantee that some function will run exactly 0.2 microseconds after a voltage hits a pin, for example. Simple micro controllers where you program the bare metal will always have a place for this kind of thing. Doing that kind of thing in python on Linux is a can of worms. But, abstracting away comms between a python script on a pc to an arduino talking to sensors is definitely someone worth perusing, though one is basically there with pyserial and some glue code.

digikata 14y ago

For embedded computing, the thing that makes a board nice to work with is good documentation (board schematics and full datasheets/reference manuals), access to the hardware, and consistent behavior. In the $20-$200 range, there's lots of choices with more power than an Arduino. I understand there's excitement about Raspberry Pi because it's particular performance is closer to what ~$200 range boards were delivering for Raspberry's @25/$35. That's really a very nice achievement, but I'm cautious to see what degree of access to hardware will be possible over time. It might be well worth an extra cost, or giving up some performance if I'm getting additional time to do cool stuff vs. spending time reverse engineering capability that could have been accessed by reading datasheets.

themgt 14y ago

I think a way to bridge Arduino shields up to a normal general purpose computing environment at a reasonable cost (e.g. http://omer.me/2012/05/introducing-ponte/ http://omer.me/2012/05/introducing-ponte/) will be the true killer app for hardware hacking. Being able to write lua/python/ruby/etc to talk directly to hardware & sensors will be incredibly powerful There's no way long-term Arduino is going to stay at it's current specs & environment, any more than TI-89 calculators could

ballooney 14y ago
Don't underestimate the usefulness of hard real time io that's easy to implement. It's nice being able to be able to guarantee that some function will run exactly 0.2 microseconds after a voltage hits a pin, for example. Simple micro controllers where you program the bare metal will always have a place for this kind of thing. Doing that kind of thing in python on Linux is a can of worms. But, abstracting away comms between a python script on a pc to an arduino talking to sensors is definitely someone worth perusing, though one is basically there with pyserial and some glue code.