This is very cool, but I don't see how it can compete with boards like the BeagleBone Black. The BleagleBone Black is $45 for a 1GHz CPU and 512 MB of memory, yet the access to low-level hardware is just as good.
The BBB and the Raspberry Pi are designed to be relatively high-power (both computational, and power draw from DC) devices running a true multiuser OS.
This thing is more akin to an Arduino Micro or a Teensy - a low-power controller that could run a very long time on a tiny battery, no OS to speak of, just a single loop of essentially real-time code.
I just made a hardware clock for my PC (7-segment LED display mounted in a CD-ROM bay slot). I used an Arduino Micro to drive the display.
I may build a dedicated media server at home. A RasPi or BBB would be perfect.
I'm thinking to launch a stratospheric balloon. I need something to hold together and drive a GPS sensor, temperature sensor, VGA camera, SD card, and radio transmitter. Total weight and power consumption are severely limited. An Arduino or Teensy would be great.
Do a wall-mount big LCD screen at the office, showing the vital stats of our website in real time, for all to see? A RasPi or BBB.
Or you could go even more bare-metal and do everything with an AVR that costs $1 and a few components that you recover from the last floor sweep, like this:
http://florin.myip.org/blog/how-make-halloween-creepy-blinki...
See the differences? Horses for courses.
It uses external memory which takes more power. It uses javascript which could take much more power. And the wifi also might not be low power. So it's not clear yet how low power it is.
var b = require('bonescript');
var state = 0;
b.pinMode("USR3", 'out');
setInterval(function() {
state = state ? 0 : 1;
b.digitalWrite("USR3", state);
}, 100);
var tessel = require('tessel')
tessel.led(1).blink()
Most modern microcontrollers have anywhere from 3 to 5 possible pin states, and I don't think it's possible to safely wrap these up in a nice, human-friendly function like "blink".
For example, on a lot of ARMs, you have:
In, no pull
In, pulled up
In, pulled down
Out, up
Out, down
and on AVRs, you have
In, no pull
In, pulled up
Out, up
Out, down
You necessarily have to have ugly secondary functions like "pinMode".
Where's the blink getting the timer from? What happens if I update the main PLLs? I'll refrain from making assumptions however until I can see their driver libraries. I'm hopeful, but having played around with the 1830 it's not a simple chip.
I can't say I particularly want the javascript, but if they've got wifi and arduino compatible gpio for ~ $25, then I can find a use for it.