Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by VLM 4394 days ago
My advice is the wrong tagline is up. If you want an embedded device running JS or higher level than C anyway, you toss in a raspi with much better hardware specs for much less money.

The secret sauce appears to be (at a glance) great software support (edited to add, I'm talking about "high level bindings" like JS... there's plenty of C for arduino, not nearly as much non-C) for a bunch of off the shelf compatible debugged plugin hardware. Also deeply buried in the docs section it appears to draw a Lot less power than a pi when doin "stuff". Of course if you want to blink a LED I think a PIC 10F220 might just slightly have you beat by approximately six orders of magnitude (no kidding, well 4 to 7 depending on blah). Anyway that kind of stuff should be the primary advertising focus, or at least thats what I found interesting.

I'm fuzzy on the "how easy is getting started" part, at least only after five minutes. Not being clear means it must be as bad as gearing up for FPGA work (just kidding I'm sure its not that bad). If its good, this might be an additional secret sauce. Here's a 60 second video from opening box to blinking LED (or, whatever)

At least that was the first five minutes impression from a hardware guy who knows the market. And I've now spent more time typing and thinking than I spent looking.