Bad ‘acting’.

Sad.. Interesting module though.

Posted at 6:55 pm on Dec 21st, 2008 by gschool

Looks like the $79 module requires the $249 base to do anything, which in turn is just a little embedded Linux box. Could be interesting but the writeup is seriously lacking in information about any of the components. (ADC? DAC? At what rates and voltage levels, pray tell? And that’s just one example.)

Posted at 6:56 pm on Dec 21st, 2008 by localroger

It’s a nice piece of kit, but sadly only programmable in java, meaning it runs some sort of limited java VM.

I can just see it now, trying to build some sort of gadget, requiring a bit of CPU muscle, or deterministic timing, and having to deal with java’s sudden garbage collection.

I wonder on the next ‘garbage collection run’, if we can just include the whole java concept.

Posted at 8:29 pm on Dec 21st, 2008 by Anne Nonymous

I forget where I saw this project first, for some reason Im thinking dragons den, probably not.

Regardless, I’m not a fan of this project. It aims to take something like the Arduino or other hardware hacking ideas and condense them down into single object oriented, linear, mud.

Something about having hardware modules like that irks me. It almost encourages the sort of thinking that you dont create an invention, you just put varios pre-existing items together and depending on how you wire it up, therin lies your creation – this is a dangerous concept in my eyes.

As a teaching aid, im sure its a very good starter. But its quite expensive.

For the price, I’d rather take my EasyPic5, or an arduino, and make my own projects that way.

perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, but something about this disturbs me.

Posted at 5:24 am on Dec 22nd, 2008 by spoofy

yes quite expensive for a “democratizing” product.
A complete atom motherboard is about half the price
Here, you pay for the design of the box,
which is useless

Posted at 7:52 am on Dec 22nd, 2008 by lebrac

java is for the weak minded and mentally disturbed programmers of the world. it was a great idea whos time has past.

Posted at 7:54 am on Dec 22nd, 2008 by chris

i gotta jump on the bashing bandwagon as well. i have no experience with the product, but the possibilities seem really limited with those “modules”. and now that i know its based in java, i won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. when i wanted to get into programming in college, they insisted on teaching me java. i absolutely hated java!

Posted at 1:39 pm on Dec 22nd, 2008 by charlie

I was taking Java and C++, java isn’t that bad, actually it good for common simple to middle tasks but definitely not for hardware It was pain to do just serial communication

Posted at 4:31 pm on Dec 22nd, 2008 by therian

my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.

Posted at 9:13 pm on Mar 4th, 2009 by Jasmine