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This is pretty cool, but imo raspberrypi is making micro-controllers obsolete. Why would you bother with such a limited environment when you can have a full linux environment + GPIO for like $10 more.
Power consumption.
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that's simply wrong. FxOS for phones didn't fail and Mozilla knows whats going on. Maybe some bad communication and PR, that's sad.
> FxOS for phones didn't fail Any new phone shipped with firefox os? Nobody buys it. It totally failed.
Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you'd expect on HN. Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there. But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and jus…
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I agree, and I come from an old-school C and embedded background. If you do it in C, you have the opposite problem: interacting with the hardware is easy, speaking to a web API becomes a huge pain. There's an "impedance mismatch", which has to be overcome somewhere. And computing power is getting cheaper and cheaper. We're at the point where if you have a little board in a case with some I/O connectors, the CPU will…
If you know C, you will love Arduino. It's very easy to "to speak to a web API". They are usually low power 8-bit CPUs with 16 MHz, exactly right for small projects like blinking some lights that should run on battery for years. JavaScript/Python/etc on RaspherryPi or this new Mozilla thingy are interesting too, though will drain your battery faster. You need an OS on a 32bit CPU. If it's connected to the web you sho…
Isn't it the opposite? If you aren't comfortable with C, Arduino has a simple enough API and good enough tutorials+documentation that you can still make it work.
If you are comfortable with C, just about everything is better than arduino because you'll get debugger support and full control over all the goodies like clocks, charge pumps, DMA controllers, asynchronous ADC operation, pin multiplexers, USB/Ethernet controllers, etc.
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I bet you don't use the NDK then.
Nope, I don't.
- Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts
- Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided
- We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support
For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list
Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues when you need to get information.
Also I am yet to see a release of the support library that isn't followed by complaints in G+.
Specs: SoC: RK3066 Memory: DDR3 1GB NAND Flash: 1GB microHDMI female microUSB x 1 (OTG) USB x 1 microUSB x 1 (UART debug) GPIO > 1 (Configurable) I2C 2 UART 2 SPI 2 Audio analog stereo IN x 1 / OUT x 1 PWM 1 Analog IN x 1
Additionally, this is likely a DIY/hobbyist board and a reference device - any major company doing their own thing will likely be building their own devices. Mozilla isn't in the B2B business.
Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you'd expect on HN. Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there. But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and jus…
This is pretty cool, but imo raspberrypi is making micro-controllers obsolete. Why would you bother with such a limited environment when you can have a full linux environment + GPIO for like $10 more.
I work in embedded systems, and a lot of the reason you would choose a microcontroller is all of the peripherals that are also part of the chip. For example, if you are doing a project where you need to control motors, you can get a micro with a lot of built in high resolution timers , built in hardware for motor commutation, decoding of encoder signals, high speed analog inputs for feedback, etc. You would also typically AVOID having a linux environment, and opt for either a hand coded loop, or an RTOS which gives predictable, deterministic performance.
In my particular industry (robotics), we definitely do like to use a more powerful computer with linux or some other high level OS on it for a lot of the high level intelligence, so a lot of what you end up seeing is almost a 'distributed system on a board', where you have a more powerful processor providing the intelligence, which then issues commands to the less powerful microcontrollers which do things like control motor torque, sample sensors, etc...
This doesn't even get into things like power consumption...simply put you can have microcontroller based systems run for months on a single coin cell battery, which is going to be a hell of a lot harder to pull off on a RasPi / linux based system.
All that said, for a lot of projects where you just want to monitor a few simple sensors, or do a basic home automation type of project, a RasPi can be a great choice! (Even if my inner engineer is screaming 'your over complicating it!') But there is definitely still a huge need and use for micro-controllers as well.
Hope that helps answer your question!
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Nope, I don't.
Then as info: - Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts - Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided - We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues whe…