Tuesday 30 July 2013

Something to share and not everyday you run into something worth sharing.............

Hi,

Here is a page where I try to share what I find on the net that is worth sharing. To start with try this:

9$ Arduinio - Do not go there, this is a Crowd Fund Scam! Sorry about that.

US$9 for an Arduino compatible is a steal! Ok, consider the org. is only about US$20, still when you are a student or low/no income, US$20 is still quite a lot. I am not saying I totally agree with under pricing someone else product, but to be fair, the design is OpenSource and in theory anyone can make one, even if they do profit on it.

I also wonder, what is Arduino? Is it a name, a concept,a brand,a standard or even an IDE? Up till now, no one has "copy" the design of the board 100% (not legally anyway) and sell it, most just say it is compatible and each design has it own "tweet" to make it different, which is good. To me this highlight even more to question of what is Arduino:

Is it a concept - Yes I suppose, since it already got product, it no longer just a concept.

Is it a brand - Yes, unfortunately. One would like it to be less of this, since this will ultimately leads to brand protection etc. which is no good for anyone. I suppose one could argue  it is there to ensure all "Arduino" do follow the quality, standard and also to protect the end user from getting rubbish from clone maker. But that is no stopping anyone from making one and call it "compatible" and still sells it.

Is it a standard - Yes, that is part of the value being and using the Arduino. It represent a standard for interfacing between the user, the micro-controller and the real/physical world. It is less of a technology than a standard, since Arduino does not own the under lying technology, ATMEL and PIC and who even make mcu does, but Arduino define how they could interface/interact with the user and the real/physical world. This in itself has more value then having mega bit hardware running at Tera hertz. You can be pretty sure your Arduino program will run on almost any platform, as long as there is a Arduino version of it. This make porting to different platform a breeze!

Is it a IDE - Yes, and part of the reason why it is successful. Not everyone need or know Eclipse,  however powerful it is.There is no one size fits all for IDE. If I just want to blink a LED, I don't want to spend weeks just to learn how to use the IDE. But then you might not want to use the Ardunio to write a real OS, then there are people who wrote thousands of line of code with it.

So there, this is my two bit for sharing and I hope this will be useful to anyone. Till next time.

Ben
31/7/2013

Update 6/9/2013

It has arrive!
 
  


BTW the case is not part of the kit. It just happen I have one lying around.

Update 9/9/2013:

You might be interested with this too. Good thing they are doing for the education of Arduino:


Update 11/11/2013:

Some more goodie from the same guy: Scam!! Don't go there! Sorry about this!





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