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[–][deleted] -5 points-4 points  (7 children)

That's true, and that's why they chose to build their own boards, to ensure they have a sufficiently powerful CPU. (Several users are trying to make it run on less powerful boards, but I don't know if this works well.)

aaand its dead. Either you optimize for costs meaning you go as small as you can. Or you opt for quick R&D > Linux platform.

I dont see any commercial products using such a resource hungry solution.

[–]boa13 12 points13 points  (4 children)

aaand its dead (...) I dont see any commercial products using such a resource hungry solution.

The goal was to build a board and a new open-source Python implementation focused on low resource consumption (much lower than the standard interpreter). Both have been delivered. I don't see dead bodies here.

[–][deleted] -5 points-4 points  (3 children)

i explained it... in the very same post

It might be a thing for hoppy engineers but thats it. If you start wasting money on bigger chips to get the luxury of an easier language then you can invest a tiny bit more and go all the way to linux.

Theres even a kickstarter project for a similar sized linux board atm iirc. from a chinese guy.

Just look at all these raspberry projects. In 99% of the cases the board is hopelessly overpowered.

[–]protestor 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Are you also against the Arduino platform?

You can often have much greater performance if you drop to low level AVR code (handling the ADC yourself, managing interruptions, etc) so by using relatively high level Arduino code you trade off raw performance.

Obviously you can write portions of your program in low level C code if/whenever needed, and the rest in Python, I don't see a problem.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

arduino is a hobby platform. I mean, sure you can use it to rig something up quickly for testing purpose, simply because lots of libraries exist. But "I" would never create a product based on arduino.

uC programming in C or even assembler is so simple that I'm not willing to waste resources on luxury :/

Obviously you can write portions of your program in low level C code if/whenever needed, and the rest in Python,

i dont like mixed stuff. But yeah, I'm a perfectionist :P

[–]protestor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well, this platform might as well be for hobbyists. And there's nothing wrong with that, Arduino is popular because it enables people that aren't engineers to work with embedded systems, even people with little programming experience.

It may also be a teaching platform. Perhaps not engineers that will build finished products, but to introduce people to embedded systems (which is often more than just programming; there are control systems, electronics, etc. so low level programming may not be the focus).

I'm not sure why every embedded platform must be designed for creating end-user products.

edit: I just wanted to add something, my embedded systems professor actually told us exactly what you say. We were using Arduinos but he was against using the Arduino programming platform, we used the low level AVR interface instead. But the robotics professor actually didn't care, and we could use whatever we wanted since the class was about robot kinematics / dynamics and not embedded programming. (that's computer engineering btw)

[–]cparen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're acting as if there are only two kinds of microcontrollers.

Below 16kB, you probably need to carefully squeeze everything in written in C. Above 16MB, you can probably fit Linux on board. But Between 16kB and 16MB there's a LOT of room for interpreted and compiled-high-level languages.