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Comment by jamesgill | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea as a learning tool, but:

1. ~USD $535 isn't exactly 'low-cost'

2. I'm confused who the audience is.

It can't be kids--this is too advanced. It can't be engineers (or student engineers)--there are better, more practical learning tools. Maybe people with an extra $500 who just enjoy fiddling around?

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Nerds with too much disposable income who will buy this, spend maybe 20 minutes total and then put it away to collect dust.

My raspberry pi is looking at your post guiltily

To be fair, though, RPi's price point is well within the impulse-purchase threshold of normal people, let alone wealthy nerds.

Same here. I fear we may be the target demographic for this thing.

mine too. at least the box (with pi inside) makes a good stand for a mesh node.

I could see it being used in classrooms. What level/grade? No idea.

It definitely has classroom energy, but for that to work out it would need to come with a whole curriculum, textbook, etc. And even then, I think a lot of parents would be asking why this oddball thing vs playing with regular 555 and opamp circuits on a breadboard.

> I think a lot of parents would be asking why this oddball thing vs playing with regular 555 and opamp circuits on a breadboard.

A lot? Like more than 50% I am very doubtful. But maybe I'm running from different demographic intuitions.

I'm not sure how many parents would know the "proper" process.

Okay, fair enough. But I know whenever schools try to adopt, say Linux or OpenOffice instead of the "industry standard" choices, there always seems to be wringing of hands about whether the children are being properly prepared for their futures.

LOL! Maybe in Santa Clara

Definitely useful once calculus is looked at. I attended a"mathematics summer school"back in 1979 at the local atomic research facility. (I was at the end of year 10). It had an overall theme that looked at global oil production and consumption, modelled using exponential functions, integrals and the like. While it was focussed on FORTRAN and BASIC, they also had a massive analog computer (hooked up to an oscilloscope) which seemed to give more real-time insight as you tweaked those coefficients.

I just completed "instrumentation lab", a college physics class, where we built amplifier circuits (presumably for use with sensors in experiments, although we just used a signal generator). Seems like this would fit right in since the other portion of the class was oscilloscope training.

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