[deutronium]

I've not heard of Berg before, just having a quick look on their front page, shows its hardware to connect an embedded system to wifi to their cloud.

Isn't this a big worry if you're using anyone else's cloud service for your own embedded hardware.

Interestingly other platforms exist that perform similar functionality using the same WIFI chip Ti CC3000 (such as Spark Core). There seems to be a number of new chips from china which look to potentially give Ti, a run for its money, such as the ESP8266.

[theoh]

Note that "their cloud" (what they called Berg Cloud) was actually primarily a local wireless access solution, not a cloud in the cloud computing sense. It was supposed to make configuration and connection of the Little Printer and other future Berg devices easier. As other commenters have pointed out, you can have an LP-type device that connects directly to a normal wifi network (e.g. Adafruit's) and the content doesn't in principle need to come from a remote web service either: it could be provided by a script running on a local machine.

The quality of presentation and the user experience provided by Berg (not just this product but other things the same guys have worked on) is great, but they show their roots in the design school. The products feel to me more like the product of brainstorming at an ad agency than a mature response to necessity. London's design scene is full of this kind of "creative" activity, and it's super enjoyable to watch but probably a form of decline or decadence in terms of real manufacturing and craft. The pace of change is so great now in tech that designers tend to get left behind or reinvent the wheel.

Imagine Twitter redesigned by someone both technically knowledgeable _and_ UX aware. (No race conditions, URL shortening, or crippled API functions.) the reason we don't have this is a cultural gap between the hip designers and the technically informed.

[jkestner]

Agreed - I think a lot of the activity there is a result of the RCA design program, and it's much needed to inject inspiration into the design-tech-culture space. But they're a distance from viable products, and (godblessem) more enamored with their own journey with craft than in getting costs down.

We just need some more intermingling and we'll get to where this is all pointing.

[deutronium]

Ah sorry I misunderstood then, what they meant by cloud.

[theoh]

No need to apologize... There is a remote element to the Little Printer service as I understand it, but they created their own concept when they invented to Berg Cloud.

[swimfar]

For those curious about the ESP8266, it's a 5$ Chinese wifi module which initially had limited/no English documentation. But now people are working on translating and testing the module[1]. Alternatives based on the TI chip from Adafruit and Sparkfun, for example, are about 35$ (with the chip by itself costing around 15$).

[1] http://hackaday.com/2014/09/06/the-current-state-of-esp8266-...

[2] http://www.adafruit.com/products/1469

[3] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12072

[deutronium]

You can get modules even cheaper than $5 on certain sites, I think mine cost around $3 from Taobao, which makes it very tempting (the chip itself is even cheaper still).

[MrBuddyCasino]

Is it? My impression was that the ESP8266 can do maybe 56k level throughput, suitable for sensors but not for streaming meaningful amounts of data. It is really really cheap though, which is great in itself and enables new applications.

Also the CC3000 is quite buggy, try using the newer CC3100/3200 if possible, pre-production silicon is already available.

[deutronium]

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive, but I'm wondering if it _may_ be possible to get faster data rates without using the AT commands, and running code on the ESP8266 itself.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Ah yes that would be the holy grail, most BLE or Wifi chips have an MCU that could be used if their dev. environment weren't the software equivalent of unobtainium, require 500$ dev boards and / or be totally obscure.

If you find out anything, make sure to post it somewhere!