This is groundbreaking. Imagine ALL of your devices in your home (fans, lights, TVs, refrigerators, etc.), powered by this little board, being able to communicate with your home computer, which in turn can let it communicate with the internet. Imagine driving on the highway and you see a message on your iPhone "You forgot to turn off the lights in your balcony. Would you like to turn it off, now?"
We need more Arduino-based startups more than photo sharing sites and hipster apps. Then this world will become truly advanced!
(I'm not saying the technology isn't there right now, I'm just saying the common man needs to be able to afford this too.)
EDIT: I know the Raspberry Pi can do it already, but the Arduino will probably fit better into basic electrical gadgets like the regular fan, light, etc. I think a fan having a HDMI port (Raspbeery Pi) would be awkward, no? That's why I think this is 'groundbreaking' for the Arduino community.
Why do the start ups need to be Arduino-based? There are a lot of excellent microcontrollers on the market aside from the ATmega. Also, that form-factor doesn't seem well suited to most applications.
For example, this thing has most of the capabilities to build a Nest (http://nest.com/) knock-off. However, it wouldn't make sense to use that board design.
Also, the cost would be much lower using a single SoC to do everything. The Yun only includes the ATmega paired with a Linux SoC so you can add WIFI while still using regular Arduino sketches.
Yeah, I did a doubletake as well. I think "groundbreaking" is a bit of an exaggeration. The Internet of Things has been on the hype train for a decade now, but it still hasn't arrived for cost reasons - and I don't think this changes the economics at all.
I used 'groundbreaking' because this is not a full-fledged computer like the Raspberry Pi and this has significant constraints when compared to the Pi. Despite this limitation they were able to include a Wi-Fi chipset.
Maybe groundbreaking should've been reserved for something else better, I'm sorry.
On the contrary this has a 400mhz MIPS-based processor with 32MB of RAM that runs a version of Linux--it definitely is a full-fledged computer, just with an Atmel AVR hanging off the serial port.
The crux right now is that it's pretty expensive to control things in the real world. One thing, fine. A couple things in close proximity, also ok. Many things, distributed over the house? Expensive.
Lets think of one device, a relay (or solidstate relay) that controls an outlet.
You need:
A radio, or a powerline networking unit ($10). Some sort of processor ($45 for a Pi w/ps and sd card). Some low level logic to connect to the relay ($.25), the relay ($2), and the power socket ($2).
If you want to control two outlets at one place, you're only duplicating from the low level stuff to the power socket. That's another $5.
If you want to do this at a location that's more than a usb cable away from site #1, you're in for another $50.
The holy grail here is a wifi enabled power socket. All it needs is a small api: status and on/off. Bonus points if there's a current sensor. This could be done with the processor from Bunny's $12 phone and the power relay bits.
But, it's got to be priced in the $10/socket range.
They've been around forever, and I dismissed them back in the internet dark ages because they only had crappy windows software and their obnoxious intrusive ads seemed to be all about "security" cameras pointing at scantily clad women.
It might be "groundbreaking" for the Arduino community but a BeagleBone Black is cheaper, far more powerful and seemingly (haven't seen official specs of Yun, but based on photos) not much bigger and can trivially be made wi-fi capable with a tiny USB dongle for like $5 on top of the $45 base price.
Don't get me wrong, this is cool and there is certainly a benefit to the entire Arduino "ecosystem", particularly for those new to hobby electronics -- the IDEs and vast amount of tutorials create a nice positive feedback loop for the beginner. However, there is a lot more to the overall "Maker" electronics community than the Arduino and in context this is a cool little product, but nothing particularly unexpected. If anything Arduino has been lagging a bit behind everyone else on actual hardware and needed to catch up and this is a nice step there.
I've got three Beaglebone Blacks and they are more powerful but not yet as well supported. The web based UI is really neat, would love to have a reliable Debian build (either Ubuntu or Wheezy, both currently suffer from a deadlock in the mmcq part of the MMC driver) The ability to add WiFi on the native stack is insanely hard (you can do it by going through the Gnome session but for an embedded system? That is a bit cumbersome, and building something that has to use dbus to talk to a daemon that is running a graphic widget on a headless system, it kind of rubs me the wrong way)
That said, I expect over time I expect the Black to do really well, and the Arduino Due. Many people could learn a lot by looking at what Arduino does well.
You laud the Arduino ecosystem as a place for hobbyists, yet you promote beaglebone? BeagleBone specifically warns against using the beaglebone in a retail product.
From the beaglebone terms of use....
You may use the Beaglebone Black as you choose. However, we do not support the use of the board in commercial products.The reasons for this are very simple.
We did not design the board for use in your product. We cannot therefore guarantee that it will work in all cases and over the full range of operation you expect.
We have had instances where people have done this and returned 25% of their purchases saying they would not work. Either the boards worked perfectly once received, or they had been blown up.
This adds to our costs and puts a burden on our RMA operation. It also takes away from our production capacity. We do not want to see our distributors run out of boards because someone is buying up the inventory.
This is literally just a cheap WiFi router (same chipset as the popular TL-WR703N) running OpenWRT and an Arduino crammed onto a single PCB. Neat form factor, but not groundbreaking in the slightest.
Interesting -- this is basically the merger of an Arduino Leonardo and a pocket router. The flavor of Linux in use is a spinoff from OpenWRT, a popular home router OS. The chip that runs on is the Atheros AR9331. Since OpenWRT supports other languages, you can now program this device in Python.
Agreed. The Atheros chips tend to be much better supported - you actually get non-binary blob wireless drivers, which is a big problem with Broadcom-based devices like the venerable Linksys WRT54G and similar.
OpenWRT is quite nice, and ships with a Lua based web interface, which is ideal for a low memory/CPU device like a router.
Embedded hardware developer/DSP programmer here:
An interesting turn in the life of the Arduino turned out to be that people used it not so much as an embedded processor, but as a peripheral extension of their laptops and desktops.
Laptops and desktops (with some exceptions...) simply don't have the peripherals (such as DACs, PWM, analog ins) which people need to deal with sensors and robotics. Therefore, Arduino's micro-peripherals were a welcome addition to the world.
Combining the workstation core (CPU) and network into one place gives the Arduino a greater level of autonomy than it used to have. It can now do much more without requiring that it's attached (tethered or "tumored") to a desktop.
Whether the price and features make it worthwhile is impossible to predict. We are in an explosion of microcontroller/embedded development right now and devices are coming out faster than people can fully learn to appreciate them (Commodore 64 junkie). It's probably best to pick the platform that has the strongest support community or the one you know the components of the best.
You used to be able to hack on the arduino without needing SMD components and a reflow station. Electronics newbies don't have those and arduino was targeted towards them. Now, they've become a component supplier, since you can't buy your own chips and hack a board on your own if you don't have an etched PCB or someway to get that. I love the libraries and platform but in the quest for more power (Mega, Due, SMD based arduinos etc.) I don't like the fact that they're shunning newbies.
I used to think the same thing, but really most SMD soldering isn't that difficult with some practice and a nice fine point soldering iron. Check out Dave Jone's videos at the EEVBlog, he has some great ones on SMD soldering like http://www.eevblog.com/2011/07/18/eevblog-186-soldering-tuto...
Also just because an Arduino board is built with SMD or very small components doesn't mean a user has to do the same thing. This board has the same headers for input/output as any other Arduino so you can attach existing shields, put on a protoboard, or just plug wires in directly. I don't see how the Yun does anything to shun newbies.
You may have a good point. But I don't think it's feasible to buy a Atmega2560 and then build a custom pcb. Majority would rather buy an Arduino Mega for their project and be done with it rather than building a custom board.
My previous comment tries to convey that you need to leave the Arduino in the project instead of just using it as a prototyping platform once you go SMD. Well sure, that'd increase sales for arduino boards.
The problem is that it's increasingly hard to get interesting chips in through-hole packages. Pretty much the only stuff Atmel sells now in DIP packages are "legacy" AVR chips -- if you want something with USB, you've got to go surface mount. As such, the question becomes do you give up on the new and interesting to stick to your roots, or do you give up on some amount of hackability so you can provide interesting things with a gentle learning curve?
Doesn't seem like a great idea to combine a low-end micro with and embedded Linux WiFi module. I've worked on systems with that type of architecture and ended up wishing I had one more powerful micro that does both.
I still like the Arduino platform but this seems like the wrong direction with so many capable low cost ARM boards to choose from.
I liked the gradation of Arduino - Raspberry Pi - Beagleboard [Add further boards to liking]. This Yún thing seems like a step into the direction of "10 different boards, that all do the same thing".
On the other hand, more competition is probably healthy for this market...
On the slide it shows an SPI- as well as uart-connection. Both should be very straight-forward to use, either relying on external libraries or by writing them yourself.
"strong integration between the creativity of your sketch and the power of Linux"
Got real excited for awhile, then realized they mean liberal arts generic meaning of the word "sketch" and not the nifty into to programming language named "Sketch". Sketch now with I/O, that would be cool.
Even more embarrassingly I was thinking of the "scratch" programming language. Sorry. Being able to upload scratch as a sketch to your yun to animate a sketch would be cool.
The desire for a rasp-pi with the shape and form and I/O plug compatible with the arduino shield ecosystem is probably a common desire and I hope it arrives soon. Someday there will be an arduino running sketch with a COTS arduino motor shield (or whatever) plugged into it.
I am not a hardware guy so pardon my ignorance, but my question is , if you already have a full general purpose computer running linux on a board, why do you need Arduino on that board also ? can't you just connect sensors directly to the linux box ?
The arduino has a nice set of shields for interfacing with sensors and other hardware. Its gpio outputs also tend to be more convenient than the GPIO from the PI.
We need more Arduino-based startups more than photo sharing sites and hipster apps. Then this world will become truly advanced!
(I'm not saying the technology isn't there right now, I'm just saying the common man needs to be able to afford this too.)
EDIT: I know the Raspberry Pi can do it already, but the Arduino will probably fit better into basic electrical gadgets like the regular fan, light, etc. I think a fan having a HDMI port (Raspbeery Pi) would be awkward, no? That's why I think this is 'groundbreaking' for the Arduino community.