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

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am comparing Go and Rust, not PHP and Go.

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

#132
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With RISC-V on the horizon, whatever they spend on the IP core license could be nixed as well. FreeRTOS port on the way.

Things are looking more and more exciting.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a matter of personal interest and hobbies for me. Most of us have them, don't we?

I'm not a good front end dev, but I still do some designing of UIs and websites.

I'm not an electronics engineer, but I still build electronics circuits as a hobby.

I'm not an artist, but I still use gimp and blender.

It's just democratization of technologies. More, the merrier!

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

#134
post #10

Creating an entire HTML page structure just to get to the code because you need a tag? Oh god.

Exactly what I thought. I think they could even use the package.json-file approach of nodejs for defining an entry point for the program..

I'm not 100% against Javascript for things like this. It does make it much easier for non-C coders to get involved (although, to be honest, beginning C isn't that hard, and if you're going down this path you should try and learn it anyways).

It's the pretense of putting it all in an HTML document. The point of HTML is not anywhere close to the use case here. Javascript is way beyond its browser origins, why would it still need to be coupled? I can't imagine tossing in an HTML parser simplifies anything either.

Oh the memory though... GC's on embedded devices scare the hell out of me.

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

#135
post #126
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Devices don't use HDMI to talk to their built-in screens due to licensing fees, complexity, etc. Usually it's either LVDS or embedded DisplayPort these days, with newer/4K screens being more likely to use DisplayPort and older ones generally using LVDS.
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