⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community: The Arduino board has been the go-to out-of-the-box hacker project darling, but for some applications, its days are looking numbered. A new wave of microcontrollers that interpret JavaScript right on the chip are just getting ready to be hacked by makers everywhere.
Last week, Technical Machine announced the Tessel, an extensible, Arduino shield-compatible chip that the startup plans to take to Kickstarter next month. But there’s already a JavaScript-on-a-chip on the crowdfunding platform: The Espruino, which aims to make open-source microcontrollers easy enough for anyone to use.
1 comment:
I have a mixed reaction to this piece of hardware.
The good:
The Espruino allows users to program and execute “live” without the need to compile the code before execution. This allows programmers to insert code while the program is running and (usually) see the change instantly.
Practically, the board has a lot of GPIO (general purpose input output) pins that allow for a lot of communication capability.
The board allows inexperienced users to program functions via the graphical user interface.
The bad:
To allow for the ease of programming detailed above, the Espruino board uses a very high level language for programming. This means that the programming language relies on underlying software architecture in order to execute. In comparison, a low level language (such as C, which is used by Arduino) interacts directly with the computer system.
A high level language has many more points of failure, is not as flexible, and not as efficient in terms of processing rate.
The bottom line:
I think this unit is great for home hobbyists, but I don’t think that this system is mature enough for production use, in entertainment or any other demanding industry.
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