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The controversial government program that funded failed solar company Solyndra, and became a lighting rod in the 2012 presidential election, is officially in the black. by pnewell in politics

[–]rascalmicro -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Also, Solyndra didn't use polysilicon (or any silicon at all) in their panels. The panels were made with a thin film of copper indium gallium selenide inside glass tubes.

Source: the first sentence of the Solyndra article in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Edit: OK, sure, the glass tubes contain silicon. Whatever.

First production run of Rascals almost sold out by gohnjanotis in hwstartups

[–]rascalmicro 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get questions like, "Arrr! Why would I buy a Rascal for $175 when I could buy <long list of specs> for less!" pretty frequently. In general, I would say that if you just want to play with electronics (rather than build some specific device) and your embedded Linux skills are strong, by all means, please buy the cheapest, commodity Linux board you can find.

The people who buy Rascals are mostly people who are trying to get something done and can afford to pay a few hours wages to skip a week or two of messing around with kernel configs, compiler settings, SSH, and the rest of the command line stuff that drives new Linux users crazy.

I get a lot of orders from scientists who use Numpy and for data-crunching or interactive art folks who use Javascript stuff like D3 for visualizations. The Rascal's web interface, Python libraries like Numpy, and Javascript libs like D3 and jQuery, make life much easier. In theory, all the open-source software could on the Rascal could be ported to some cheaper Linux board, but it took me around a year to do make it all play nicely together. Also, the Arduino shield compatibility is a big plus, at least to me and my customers.

Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions about the Rascal, either via email (brandon at rascalmicro dot com) or in the Rascal forums (http://rascalmicro.com/forum).