5 ms·

This is groundbreaking. Imagine ALL of your devices in your home (fans, lights, TVs, refrigerators, etc.), powered by this little board, being able to communica

by neya 13y ago

This is groundbreaking. Imagine ALL of your devices in your home (fans, lights, TVs, refrigerators, etc.), powered by this little board, being able to communicate with your home computer, which in turn can let it communicate with the internet. Imagine driving on the highway and you see a message on your iPhone "You forgot to turn off the lights in your balcony. Would you like to turn it off, now?" We need more Arduino-based startups more than photo sharing sites and hipster apps. Then this world will become truly advanced! (I'm not saying the technology isn't there right now, I'm just saying the common man needs to be able to afford this too.) EDIT: I know the Raspberry Pi can do it already, but the Arduino will probably fit better into basic electrical gadgets like the regular fan, light, etc. I think a fan having a HDMI port (Raspbeery Pi) would be awkward, no? That's why I think this is 'groundbreaking' for the Arduino community.

platz 13y ago
I thought you were serious, then I thought you were trolling, and finally figured out you were serious.
- krapht 13y ago
  Yeah, I did a doubletake as well. I think "groundbreaking" is a bit of an exaggeration. The Internet of Things has been on the hype train for a decade now, but it still hasn't arrived for cost reasons - and I don't think this changes the economics at all.
  - neya 13y ago
    I used 'groundbreaking' because this is not a full-fledged computer like the Raspberry Pi and this has significant constraints when compared to the Pi. Despite this limitation they were able to include a Wi-Fi chipset. Maybe groundbreaking should've been reserved for something else better, I'm sorry.
    - maaku 13y ago
      It's also twice as expensive as a Pi.
    - tdicola 13y ago
      On the contrary this has a 400mhz MIPS-based processor with 32MB of RAM that runs a version of Linux--it definitely is a full-fledged computer, just with an Atmel AVR hanging off the serial port.
jmaygarden 13y ago
Why do the start ups need to be Arduino-based? There are a lot of excellent microcontrollers on the market aside from the ATmega. Also, that form-factor doesn't seem well suited to most applications. For example, this thing has most of the capabilities to build a Nest (http://nest.com/ http://nest.com/) knock-off. However, it wouldn't make sense to use that board design. Also, the cost would be much lower using a single SoC to do everything. The Yun only includes the ATmega paired with a Linux SoC so you can add WIFI while still using regular Arduino sketches.
skaevola 13y ago
And then 4chan floods your house using your dishwasher...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
makomk 13y ago
This is literally just a cheap WiFi router (same chipset as the popular TL-WR703N) running OpenWRT and an Arduino crammed onto a single PCB. Neat form factor, but not groundbreaking in the slightest.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  Really? I've been working on making a device very similar to this (and the Spark Core), and haven't heard of anything like this before a month ago. Please tell me, from where have you been sourcing your wifi Arduinos?
  - pbo 13y ago
    From here, for the past 3 years: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822
    - stephengillie 13y ago
      Oh...well... Thanks. :)
georgemcbay 13y ago
It might be "groundbreaking" for the Arduino community but a BeagleBone Black is cheaper, far more powerful and seemingly (haven't seen official specs of Yun, but based on photos) not much bigger and can trivially be made wi-fi capable with a tiny USB dongle for like $5 on top of the $45 base price. Don't get me wrong, this is cool and there is certainly a benefit to the entire Arduino "ecosystem", particularly for those new to hobby electronics -- the IDEs and vast amount of tutorials create a nice positive feedback loop for the beginner. However, there is a lot more to the overall "Maker" electronics community than the Arduino and in context this is a cool little product, but nothing particularly unexpected. If anything Arduino has been lagging a bit behind everyone else on actual hardware and needed to catch up and this is a nice step there.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I've got three Beaglebone Blacks and they are more powerful but not yet as well supported. The web based UI is really neat, would love to have a reliable Debian build (either Ubuntu or Wheezy, both currently suffer from a deadlock in the mmcq part of the MMC driver) The ability to add WiFi on the native stack is insanely hard (you can do it by going through the Gnome session but for an embedded system? That is a bit cumbersome, and building something that has to use dbus to talk to a daemon that is running a graphic widget on a headless system, it kind of rubs me the wrong way) That said, I expect over time I expect the Black to do really well, and the Arduino Due. Many people could learn a lot by looking at what Arduino does well.
- _fs 13y ago
  You laud the Arduino ecosystem as a place for hobbyists, yet you promote beaglebone? BeagleBone specifically warns against using the beaglebone in a retail product. From the beaglebone terms of use.... You may use the Beaglebone Black as you choose. However, we do not support the use of the board in commercial products.The reasons for this are very simple. We did not design the board for use in your product. We cannot therefore guarantee that it will work in all cases and over the full range of operation you expect. We have had instances where people have done this and returned 25% of their purchases saying they would not work. Either the boards worked perfectly once received, or they had been blown up. This adds to our costs and puts a burden on our RMA operation. It also takes away from our production capacity. We do not want to see our distributors run out of boards because someone is buying up the inventory.
wiredfool 13y ago
The crux right now is that it's pretty expensive to control things in the real world. One thing, fine. A couple things in close proximity, also ok. Many things, distributed over the house? Expensive. Lets think of one device, a relay (or solidstate relay) that controls an outlet. You need: A radio, or a powerline networking unit ($10). Some sort of processor ($45 for a Pi w/ps and sd card). Some low level logic to connect to the relay ($.25), the relay ($2), and the power socket ($2). If you want to control two outlets at one place, you're only duplicating from the low level stuff to the power socket. That's another $5. If you want to do this at a location that's more than a usb cable away from site #1, you're in for another $50. The holy grail here is a wifi enabled power socket. All it needs is a small api: status and on/off. Bonus points if there's a current sensor. This could be done with the processor from Bunny's $12 phone and the power relay bits. But, it's got to be priced in the $10/socket range.
- krapht 13y ago
  X10 powered sockets are $20, and do exactly what you described, yet don't have wide adoption at all.
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    They've been around forever, and I dismissed them back in the internet dark ages because they only had crappy windows software and their obnoxious intrusive ads seemed to be all about "security" cameras pointing at scantily clad women. /me realizes that I've just dated myself here.
- snarfy 13y ago
  Well, here are three outlets for $22. http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity%C2%AE-Wireless-Controlled-Electrical-Included/dp/B0087DAW46 http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity%C2%AE-Wireless-Controlled-Ele... And here is a project for them: http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-GPIO-home-automation/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-GPIO-home-autom...

by neya 13y ago

platz 13y ago

I thought you were serious, then I thought you were trolling, and finally figured out you were serious.

krapht 13y ago
Yeah, I did a doubletake as well. I think "groundbreaking" is a bit of an exaggeration. The Internet of Things has been on the hype train for a decade now, but it still hasn't arrived for cost reasons - and I don't think this changes the economics at all.
- neya 13y ago
  I used 'groundbreaking' because this is not a full-fledged computer like the Raspberry Pi and this has significant constraints when compared to the Pi. Despite this limitation they were able to include a Wi-Fi chipset. Maybe groundbreaking should've been reserved for something else better, I'm sorry.
  - maaku 13y ago
    It's also twice as expensive as a Pi.
  - tdicola 13y ago
    On the contrary this has a 400mhz MIPS-based processor with 32MB of RAM that runs a version of Linux--it definitely is a full-fledged computer, just with an Atmel AVR hanging off the serial port.

jmaygarden 13y ago

Why do the start ups need to be Arduino-based? There are a lot of excellent microcontrollers on the market aside from the ATmega. Also, that form-factor doesn't seem well suited to most applications. For example, this thing has most of the capabilities to build a Nest (http://nest.com/ http://nest.com/) knock-off. However, it wouldn't make sense to use that board design. Also, the cost would be much lower using a single SoC to do everything. The Yun only includes the ATmega paired with a Linux SoC so you can add WIFI while still using regular Arduino sketches.

skaevola 13y ago

And then 4chan floods your house using your dishwasher...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

makomk 13y ago

This is literally just a cheap WiFi router (same chipset as the popular TL-WR703N) running OpenWRT and an Arduino crammed onto a single PCB. Neat form factor, but not groundbreaking in the slightest.

stephengillie 13y ago
Really? I've been working on making a device very similar to this (and the Spark Core), and haven't heard of anything like this before a month ago. Please tell me, from where have you been sourcing your wifi Arduinos?
- pbo 13y ago
  From here, for the past 3 years: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    Oh...well... Thanks. :)

georgemcbay 13y ago

It might be "groundbreaking" for the Arduino community but a BeagleBone Black is cheaper, far more powerful and seemingly (haven't seen official specs of Yun, but based on photos) not much bigger and can trivially be made wi-fi capable with a tiny USB dongle for like $5 on top of the $45 base price. Don't get me wrong, this is cool and there is certainly a benefit to the entire Arduino "ecosystem", particularly for those new to hobby electronics -- the IDEs and vast amount of tutorials create a nice positive feedback loop for the beginner. However, there is a lot more to the overall "Maker" electronics community than the Arduino and in context this is a cool little product, but nothing particularly unexpected. If anything Arduino has been lagging a bit behind everyone else on actual hardware and needed to catch up and this is a nice step there.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
I've got three Beaglebone Blacks and they are more powerful but not yet as well supported. The web based UI is really neat, would love to have a reliable Debian build (either Ubuntu or Wheezy, both currently suffer from a deadlock in the mmcq part of the MMC driver) The ability to add WiFi on the native stack is insanely hard (you can do it by going through the Gnome session but for an embedded system? That is a bit cumbersome, and building something that has to use dbus to talk to a daemon that is running a graphic widget on a headless system, it kind of rubs me the wrong way) That said, I expect over time I expect the Black to do really well, and the Arduino Due. Many people could learn a lot by looking at what Arduino does well.
_fs 13y ago
You laud the Arduino ecosystem as a place for hobbyists, yet you promote beaglebone? BeagleBone specifically warns against using the beaglebone in a retail product. From the beaglebone terms of use.... You may use the Beaglebone Black as you choose. However, we do not support the use of the board in commercial products.The reasons for this are very simple. We did not design the board for use in your product. We cannot therefore guarantee that it will work in all cases and over the full range of operation you expect. We have had instances where people have done this and returned 25% of their purchases saying they would not work. Either the boards worked perfectly once received, or they had been blown up. This adds to our costs and puts a burden on our RMA operation. It also takes away from our production capacity. We do not want to see our distributors run out of boards because someone is buying up the inventory.

wiredfool 13y ago

The crux right now is that it's pretty expensive to control things in the real world. One thing, fine. A couple things in close proximity, also ok. Many things, distributed over the house? Expensive. Lets think of one device, a relay (or solidstate relay) that controls an outlet. You need: A radio, or a powerline networking unit ($10). Some sort of processor ($45 for a Pi w/ps and sd card). Some low level logic to connect to the relay ($.25), the relay ($2), and the power socket ($2). If you want to control two outlets at one place, you're only duplicating from the low level stuff to the power socket. That's another $5. If you want to do this at a location that's more than a usb cable away from site #1, you're in for another $50. The holy grail here is a wifi enabled power socket. All it needs is a small api: status and on/off. Bonus points if there's a current sensor. This could be done with the processor from Bunny's $12 phone and the power relay bits. But, it's got to be priced in the $10/socket range.

krapht 13y ago
X10 powered sockets are $20, and do exactly what you described, yet don't have wide adoption at all.
- wiredfool 13y ago
  They've been around forever, and I dismissed them back in the internet dark ages because they only had crappy windows software and their obnoxious intrusive ads seemed to be all about "security" cameras pointing at scantily clad women. /me realizes that I've just dated myself here.
snarfy 13y ago
Well, here are three outlets for $22. http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity%C2%AE-Wireless-Controlled-Electrical-Included/dp/B0087DAW46 http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity%C2%AE-Wireless-Controlled-Ele... And here is a project for them: http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-GPIO-home-automation/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-GPIO-home-autom...