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Comment by coconutrandom | Hacker News Reader

In their defense, it's not claiming to "break ground" any more than the PC broke ground over the mainframes at the time.

But as a software hacker wanting to move to meatspace, what do you suggest as better?

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90% of everything that I've seen done with the Arduino (that doesn't require portability) can be done with an old PC that has a parallel port and any Linux distro that has gcc.

I'm not dissing the Arduino; I think it's an interesting platform, but it really is overhyped.

a PC doesn't have analog inputs, cant do PWM outputs, struggles with protocols like i2c, isnt realtime. but it is: loud, hard to enclose nicely, costs more and requires maintenance.

And none of what you've said falls into the 90% of what I've seen done with an Arduino.

Depends entirely on what you want to do in "meatspace", of course. There are lots of options for, say, robot control out there. Hacking one's Roomba seems popular. If you have a spare laptop or netbook, there are huge numbers of USB-based interface devices you can use to deal with the outside world without even leaving the comfort of your PC.

And, when you're ready for "serious" work (something other than turning lights and motors on and reading sensors at 10 Hz), you'll probably want to be looking at FPGA development boards and learning Verilog or VHDL. Take a look at the products from http://knjn.com for example.

I feel the Arduino is little overhyped. It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board.

I definitely agree that the BeagleBoard is really interesting as well. I've got some friends working on a building an incredibly simple OS that would be used for education and tinkering. However, if you don't think the barrier to entry of having to build a board from scratch and jump over all the other proprietary hoops for working with PIC keeps out lots of people -- from programmers and other non-hardware geeks to artists, designers, kids, teachers, etc. -- you need to work on increasing your empathy with people who aren't you.

"It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. "

Actually, it is. People who are 'starting hacking' dont know how to hack, so they dont clock, power or wire their chips correctly. They don't have a scope so its impossible to debug, especially when there are multiple unknowns (power, clock, wiring, programmer, progammer driver, programming software, compiler, code)

"I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board."

I like the BB too. But am puzzled as to why people compare it to Arduino. They are completely different things (computer vs microcontroller dev board) I can't think of any projects that really intersect between the two. BB can't do even the most basic things that an Arduino does, like blink LEDs or drive a servo. And of course, an Arduino cant do real time video processing

Ladyada, I think the reason that people compare it to Arduino is not so much because it's in the same category (which it's obviously not), but because it seems to be bringing the "Arduino philosophy" to the low-level ARM/embedded Linux sphere. As someone who went from zero embedded device hacking to some fluency because of Arduino, the Beagle Board seems exciting because it has the chance of opening up that related space to me as well.

Well, I think I was being a little elitist. I guess there's this tendency among people like me which goes like "I was forced to learn things the hard way and hence its good to learn things hard way".

But back when I started, I was just a cash strapped high school kid who happend to find a couple of PIC16F84s. And I had lots of fun building a simple parallel port programmer and playing with them.

My next pet project involves a beagle board and 4 AT2313s driving 4 brushless motors. Just waiting for my beagle board. The beagle board does have a couple of GPIOs and 3 PWMs, so blinking an led or driving a servo should be possible :)

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