Creating useful things is also very fun. And takes about the same time/energy.
Anyway, doing stuff with a raspberry pi has no hacker merits IMHO. Anybody can connect stuff to a portable supercomputer and make it do things.
Anyway, doing stuff with a raspberry pi has no hacker merits IMHO. Anybody can connect stuff to a portable supercomputer and make it do things.
What you're probably trying to communicate (maybe in an overly-honest way) is that there is a great disparity between the function being performed and the power of the hardware there. The main obstacle the author encountered was his lack of knowledge related to electronics and embedded systems, not the scarcity of resources or the difficulty of the problem (or both) that are typically considered hacky. This is very much equivalent to writing the well-known Currency Converter application in Scala. On a quad-core system. You don't see much of that on HN.
I know people in my field (embedded systems) who, like me, are somewhat embittered by the "Arduino" and the "RPi" culture. The rate at which I have to explain why something is inadequate for mass manufacturing, unsafe, sub-optimal or outright disastrous to people who think transistors have holes in them but are really convinced <something> is simple because they did it in node.js, on their PIs, with a couple of wires and arduino shields hooked up, has probably tripled since the Pi became popular. But not everyone who is happy about how a small hack they did works is also an arrogant asshole, and we should probably remember that before bashing them.
Building stuff and "hacking" has no requirement for hardware. It hasn't been that way for a long while. Now excuse me while I gladly take our Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and "software" thingimaggigs off your precious lawn.
It's nice to make one once in a while, but if you only do fun and easy projects then you are wasting your life. You should try to push yourself to make things that are not easy. Get outside your comfort zone. Doing stuff with a supercomputer like the raspberry pi is easy (BTW also, it is very cheap, and sometimes projects are good only because of that).
In this case, the builders had to think about their users, the best way to notify people, the kind of notifications which would work best (active/passive) and in doing so, they've just strengthened those neural pathways that are involved in this sort of customer-focused thinking.
The fact that it's technically easy just means that it was a lightweight thing to do which didn't take up much time at all and generally improved morale. I think that's a good thing.