Comments on: Bug Labs releases BUGvonHippel universal module

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:13:44 +0000

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�.

By: therian

therian — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:31:28 +0000

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

By: charlie

charlie — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:39:33 +0000

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!

By: chris

chris — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:54:00 +0000

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

By: lebrac

lebrac — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:52:54 +0000

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

By: spoofy

spoofy — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:24:54 +0000

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.

By: Anne Nonymous

Anne Nonymous — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:29:41 +0000

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.

By: localroger

localroger — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:56:20 +0000

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.)

By: gschool

gschool — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:55:10 +0000

Bad ‘acting’.

Sad.. Interesting module though.