I am actually hoping for something like web assembly versioned modules with a p2p module registry to become popular for iot, blockchain, everything. Web assembly is actually a language-agnostic abstract syntax tree which can be JITd/compiled across architectures.
Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
111–120 of 135 posts
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 cheaper product.
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I was really impressed with the Pebble SDK on this front(aside from the one-message-at-a-time part of the comms API). Solid clean C API. Phone does all the heavy web-lifting, it really is best of both worlds. Also PebbleCloud is one of the slickest web IDEs I've seen(working emulator streaming over VPN!).
Is this something that can applied to a regular embedded development ? how ?
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was really impressed with the Pebble SDK on this front(aside from the one-message-at-a-time part of the comms API). Solid clean C API. Phone does all the heavy web-lifting, it really is best of both worlds. Also PebbleCloud is one of the slickest web IDEs I've seen(working emulator streaming over VPN!).
Is this something that can applied to a regular embedded development ? how ?
Pebble is kinda unique in that it's 90% of the time within range of a paired smartphone.
ESP8266 gets close, but I haven't worked with it enough to make a formal opinion on it.
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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!!!
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#116Welp. 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…
The biggest problem I can see here is how limited using a browser as an API is. It has USB ports but there doesn't seem to be a way to add new functions to speak to them in the browser API. Likewise, there's no UART API, so using this to control an Arduino for any sort of real-time needs is going to be much more difficult. There are no event hooks for hardware, which means you have to fall back to polling the device for data. There is no sort of server API, so anything this device does to connect to the outside world will require pushing to an intermediary.
While I understand your desire to use javascript to program it, the API presented thus far is slipshod and half-assed. This is barely a tech demo, and is going to need a lot more structure and development for it to be compelling as an IoT device that's more than just a toy.
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this something that can applied to a regular embedded development ? how ?
Pebble is kinda unique in that it's 90% of the time within range of a paired smartphone. ESP8266 gets close, but I haven't worked with it enough to make a formal opinion on it.
They also have a new chip, ESP32 , with more ram, IO ,bluetooth, and they say it's just slightly more expensive.
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#118This 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 ge…
Two other very important reasons:
* More IO options
* Arduino libraries (there is a easy to use lib for every component/sensor/...)
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#119Earlier 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.
By that logic PHP is a much better language than Go, and has better engineers.
Re: Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla
#120Programming a single-board computer in JavaScript is reasonable. But why embed the JavaScript in HTML? There's no browser, no screen, and no user.