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

mozopenhard.mozillafactory.org

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

#121

Post by makomk »

vertex-four wrote: post #97
wycx wrote: 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

Note that everyone's missed - it has HDMI out. This is looking more at smart devices that display information and which you can interact with directly, rather than devices which you configure occasionally and which are hidden otherwise. 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…

Which is useful for early prototyping I guess, but does it have any way of interfacing to non-HDMI screens? You wouldn't want to use HDMI for a product, and even for DIY hobbyist stuff it's probably not ideal; small HDMI screens with touch are exotic, expensive, and not all that small.

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

#122

Post by foxylad »

pjc50 wrote: post #80
frik wrote: 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…

I thought Arduinos didn't come with Ethernet on the chip, and instead you have a Heath-Robinson addon board which you speak SPI to another microprocessor which has the TCP/IP stack, MAC and PHY on? The only thing I've seen that seems to really be viable for remote battery operation is the ESP2866. I have a Pi in my cupboard reading the electricity meter. I really ought to learn Arduino, simply because it's so popular…

You can now program the ESP8266 family with the Arduino IDE, in effect giving you a more powerful arduino with built in WiFi. That costs less than $5.

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

#123

Post by zippergz »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
beardicus wrote: post #51

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…

> interacting with the hardware is easy, speaking to a web API becomes a huge pain.

Particle (particle.io) does a pretty nice job of bridging this gap in my experience. You still write code in C-like Wiring, but they have built-in APIs for storing data in the cloud and calling webhooks. It's not as simple as interacting with web apis from JS, and the fact that it relies on their cloud service would make me hesitate to use it in a commercial product. But for my home play projects, it provides a really nice balance of using C for the hardware stuff without making the networking stuff a major pain.

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

#124

Post by e12e »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #115
petra wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure cpu's are cheap, but the thinking in the embedded world is still - i'm making 20K of this(or maybe a lot more) , and if i save 50cents on the cpu - this is $10K so management will like this savings, even if it takes some work. But actually , if you can replace the physical UI with a phone based UI using a cheap bluetooth mcu and some framework like blynk or simblee ,than you'll have a decent ram/flash and a chea…

I was going to make a similar comment about UI, but deleted it. However, thank you for telling me about Blynk. It's the app I've been planning to write for so long!!!

For clarity, you're talking about:

https://github.com/blynkkk/blynk-server (etc)?

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

#125

Post by pcwalton »

kibwen wrote: post #37
mundanevoice wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I thin…

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…

> whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification

I'm flattered, but I don't even rank among the top five CSS wizards in this building, much less on the planet :)

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

#126

Post by e12e »

makomk wrote: post #121
vertex-four wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that everyone's missed - it has HDMI out. This is looking more at smart devices that display information and which you can interact with directly, rather than devices which you configure occasionally and which are hidden otherwise. 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…

Which is useful for early prototyping I guess, but does it have any way of interfacing to non-HDMI screens? You wouldn't want to use HDMI for a product, and even for DIY hobbyist stuff it's probably not ideal; small HDMI screens with touch are exotic, expensive, and not all that small.

Is there any reason they'll remain exotic, expensive and not that small? (I don't know what interface the typical high-dpi oled touch screens use, like the ones you find on a Galaxy Note 4 etc) -- but it seems that HDMI might make perfect sense for a tiny 4k screen (and it seems reasonable those will become more and more common)?

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

#127

Post by pcwalton »

pjmlp wrote: post #102
mundanevoice wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yeah, it's stunning how impossible it is in 2016 to profile native code on Android with Google tools. Meanwhile, Apple has had arguably the best CPU profiler available anywhere on any platform (Instruments.app) for years and years.

NVIDIA has done an incredible job making this basic functionality work on their Android systems…yet, sadly, their work doesn't extend to all Android platforms.

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

#128

Post by rasz_pl »

lovelearning wrote: post #40
jokoon wrote: post #3

"Make Real Things with Browser Technologies" How is that better or so different than making real things in C ? What problem would it solve? I get that js got very popular thanks to browsers, but does that mean we should use js for everything? Seems like mozilla is just trying to salvage firefoxOS.

No compiling and linking required. Web and front end devs who are already familiar with JS can program IoT applications.

the question is should they?

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

#129

Post by petra »

e12e wrote: post #124
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to make a similar comment about UI, but deleted it. However, thank you for telling me about Blynk. It's the app I've been planning to write for so long!!!

For clarity, you're talking about: https://github.com/blynkkk/blynk-server (etc)?

Yes.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

mundanevoice wrote: post #73
espadrine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space. However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/ . I believe your asses…

Well, you could say Servo is world class, but on what basis? Rust looks very nice but hardly anyone outside Mozilla is actually using in production as compared to Golang which has a very good adaptation in the community.

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