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Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

mozopenhard.mozillafactory.org

101–110 of 135 posts

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#101
post #14

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

Another Rockchip board. Definitely buying this now.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#102
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I sympathise with your problem and I understand it must be pretty shitty. But Java is the main language for Android, C/C++ support is via NDK. Since a majority of devs write in Java, naturally more emphasis is given on the Java ecosystem and not the NDK, which is definitely sad. Also, what big Open Source project doesn't have issues? Could you name one?

Yet Microsoft and NVidia are able to provide a much better experience for NDK users, for a platform they don't own.

So what are those Google experts doing?

I like Java a lot, but C++ is the current kind of portability across mobile OS for native applications, as common language across SDKs.

If I would be doing this commercially, I would have gone Xamarin already.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#103
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Mozilla at large, but I've had the pleasure of witnessing both Mozilla's Rust and Servo teams at work and can assure you that they are at the top of their league. To pick just two examples, Alex Crichton is an unstoppable machine ricocheting around the compiler, standard libraries, package manager, various miscellaneous tooling, and dozens of libraries in the broader Rust ecosystem leaving patches i…

Well, you have a point but you see, both Rust and Servo are at the nascent stage. We still have to see widespread adoption of Rust. Servo is definitely way behind any browser engine in terms of features and specs and rewriting from scratch might also introduce new bugs(happens with every software product of considerable size). To summarise, both of these are very nice and ambitious goals but I really hope they turn i…

How does this point about adoption have anything to do with the parent's point about the capability of the engineers?

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#104
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you know C, you will love Arduino. 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 operati…

It depends what you want/need. Initially I thought like you too, I coded embedded C stuff years ago. Though for quick prototyping and hobby things, it's a lot faster to write C code with macros (=Arduino), you can put together a nice prototype in hours. If you want to sell your product, you can always rewrite it later.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#105
post #56

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…

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…

Coming also from a hardware design & embedded background, it was quite a surprise when I began to notice this a few years ago. I was so accustomed to processors being expensive that it was a shock to notice that as their prices dropped close to zero, it was the connectors and switches in my design that were becoming the expensive bits.

OTOH, CPUs are now so cheap they have become replacements for fixed logic devices.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#106
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you know C, you will love Arduino. 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 operati…

I live in the middle. For quickie little projects like my NMEA protocol converter, the Arduino tools & IDE are fine, if barely adequate as the project has grown.

However, I have another project where Atmel Studio is a better choice. So I import all the Arduino libraries I need (there's a plugin that can do this automatically, but it's buggy), and then just build it as a regular C++ project but I get "free" use of the libraries without the crappy Arduino IDE.

The nice thing about Arduino is it's so popular that the economies of scale let me buy hardware cheaper than I could build it myself and pretty much all the libraries I need are already written. Although I have had to debug a few of them!! The bad thing is their terrible interface that's really made for tiny programs only.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#107
post #76

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.

A handful of reasons

* Power consumption

* Maybe your overall budget is less that $10 for everything

* Size: one project I'm working on has a 1.5x2.0" space available for electronics

* Start time. Maybe you need to get in control within 50mS of power on before that actuator starts flailing wildly around.

* Control over the entire stack. You can't always trust the code running underneath you.

I could go on, but you get the gist...

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#108
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most embedded applications consist of a tight loop of constant polling. People slow things down by using delays... But if you use the wrong sort of delay (read: the most popular one https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Delay ), you'll end up executing nops instead of powering down the processor

What would then be the right way to sleep? I've always wanted to do something like 'sleep until event and do absolutely nothing till them', but end up using the delay every time.

As others said, it depends.

I have one application where the CPU literally does nothing other than process switch actions (it turns a double click into a single click), so it goes into deep sleep and pressing a pushbutton is the only thing that wakes it up.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strange comment that starts in one place, and ends with your musings on the collapse of Mozilla. First off, Mozilla didn't have FF "fall into their lap" from Netscape. Netscape spun it off and gave birth to Mozilla. They absolutely do not consider Firefox legacy software and you'll need to back that up somehow for me to believe it. They may very well be a better company at $2M than they are at $300M, but th…

> First off, Mozilla didn't have FF "fall into their lap" from Netscape. Netscape spun it off and gave birth to Mozilla. Not that this is a critical point worth arguing about or getting bogged down with pendantics... but I don't see any meaningful distinction in what we're saying. Mozilla was bootstrapped with Netscape IP. They maintained Navigator/Communicator for awhile, then split its browser and email features in…

> I'm simply wholly uninspired by everything that Mozilla leadership is trying to inspire me with today. The declining usage of their flagship applications, along with failure to gain traction for new initiatives, indicates that I'm hardly a minority. They need a more focused vision and identity.

I miss being enthusiastic about Firefox. I've used it since it was Phoenix. It was an absolute joy to use until some time in the 2.x series, IIRC. These days? Chrome's snappier, I like its interface better, its extension ecosystem is nearly as good, and it's ~1/10 as likely to make my fan kick on. Safari's so much easier on my battery that it's like the others aren't even trying, so I end up using it most of the time even though it's my least-favorite of the three.

I'd like something that is to Firefox what Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was to the Mozilla Suite.

Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

#110
post #76

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.

In many cases, sure, however there are definitely cases where microcontrollers still make sense, i.e. real-time control, low power applications. 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 resoluti…

Thanks for the details. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I was looking at it from a home automation perspective. I have both a photon particle and a raspi. The raspi just opens so many more doors for me, but power consumption is not an issue since I always have it plugged in.
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