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Comment by glimcat | Hacker News Reader

You could sadly do better with an Arduino Mini and a Zigbee, if you had "Hello World" level knowledge of electronics and microcontroller programming. One of the big ongoing issues in this field is that sensor nodes need to be cheap, as you ideally want to have a number of them around. Simultaneously, you need to not be changing batteries all the time.

Want to see some serious internet-of-things action? Put Bluetooth Low Energy radios in the next iPhone.

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Yep. But we're aiming this at beneath "Hello World" level electronics knowledge, and at people who _could_ do the work but appreciate being able to work with it at a more abstract level.

You can also do it lower level with AVR microcontrollers and a bunch of sensors. Arduino itself is a simpler, higher abstraction enabling architecture that doesn't compete with industrial level electronics in terms of cost/performance.

This is simple a higher abstraction framework. Something I can probably entertain my SO with.

I'm CS/EE and I'd still use something like this and enjoy it. If I had any time left for distractions right now.

Might take the plunge.

I like a little (cheap) abstraction in my device development. I can always go back and bitbang in Assembly later once I'm certain what I want it to do.

I also think that reprogrammability is a significant feature for some of these IOT applications, so it may make sense to maintain compatibility with the Arduino stack longer-term if possible - and since it's open, you can do so while using your own board.

> Put Bluetooth Low Energy radios in the next iPhone.

Not sure this is what you meant, but the iPhone 4S already has a Bluetooth Low Energy radio and an API to control it (CoreBluetooth).

As we support USB you can add Low Energy Bluetooth that way. I believe Bluegiga just release some in USB format.

Thanks. I knew they included Bluetooth 4.0, but Low Energy was left out of the specs page. I actually still can't find any mention of it except in CoreBluetooth - their site organization is a bit painful if you're not there to buy.

There's also a demo implementation for Android by one of the radio manufacturers - not great, but maybe usable for initial development. This is much more significant on iPhone because it diffuses into the market more rapidly than a single model of Android handheld usually will.

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