Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

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Electric Imp is trying to patent (something around) using a light and a photo diode for communication. That's not a good sign, but enough about that, the Photon (assuming they actually ship) and its price point are much more interesting to me as a hobbyist. They also have schematics and gerber files for their hardware which is more than I can say for Electric Imp.

> In particular the integration with Squirrel means that much more complex things can be done, more easily, and without touching the running hardware. The Spark (Core) on the other hand is much like an Arduino

Thanks for the clarification, I've never tried Spark before, though I will once mine arrives. :)

How much of the Imp's advantage here is due to features of Squirrel the language itself, and how much is due to their 'cloudification' of the ecosystem?

   > How much of the Imp's advantage here is due to features 
   > of Squirrel the language itself, and how much is due to 
   > their 'cloudification' of the ecosystem?

I believe it all relates to the cloud aspect of it. The systems model is that the Imp is simply an intelligent channel controller at the end of the connection. This gives two advantages, one is that "infinite" state can be kept off chip, and the other is that updates can occur without the modules participation.

I don't doubt that a similar setup could be recreated for the Spark with some standardization on what the Photon expects from the network.

As for the patent, at least what they are trying to patent is actual hardware not some 18th century practice but done with a computer :-)

Just wanted to also add that Imp has gerber files for many of their reference designs and dev boards here:

https://electricimp.com/docs/hardware/resources/reference-de...

I'm looking for a schematic for what's inside the SD-form factor card, which these are not.

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