Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you'd expect on HN.<p>Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there.<p>But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and just want to prototype some blinky lights or a flood sensor in your basement, now you've already got all the skills you need. You're not producing a million units, you're not worried about power so much as it'll be plugged in. An evening with a soldering iron and your text editor and off you go.<p>Anyways. For prior art on this ecosystem, see janOS:<p><a href="http://janos.io/" rel="nofollow">http://janos.io/</a><p>which is basically stripped down firefoxOS which runs your app only (none of the launcher crud and such) in god-mode. It's actually quite fun to go grab a $30 phone off of ebay, and have a nice programmable screen and sensor suite with wifi, gps, and cell connectivity. Indeed, I find it more compelling than this board they're releasing, because I like taking advantage of the cheapness of mass manufacturing. The only downside is it's difficult to impossible to break out any GPIO on phones.
Specs:<p>SoC: RK3066
Memory: DDR3 1GB
NAND Flash: 1GB
microHDMI female
microUSB x 1 (OTG)
USB x 1
microUSB x 1 (UART debug)
GPIO > 1 (Configurable)
I2C 2
UART 2
SPI 2
Audio analog stereo IN x 1 / OUT x 1
PWM 1
Analog IN x 1
//We will share openly the firmware code, board design, manufacturing process, API spec, and all necessary sources. //<p>thats a good thing bcoz firmware code is not open in Raspberry PI
Mozilla does so many things. I am afraid they loose their focus on one thing they could have done best. Make the best open source browser of the world. Look how they abandoned firefox OS phones. They shouldn't hope to become Google by doing almost everything Google does. Google is way bigger and has better Engineers.
<title>CHIRIMEN example - Led</title><p>Weird code like this is what you get when you apply web technologies to hardware. But I guess I should wait until their docs come out, maybe the title tag will be used by something.
They properly have a better chance here than with FFOS, there are no carries to interface with and the audience is developers who know mozilla in advance.
I opened this on my phone, and just seen some links (MozOpenHand Links). I had no idea there was supposed to be more content here. The actual content is hidden for mobile UAs (I have no idea why, but it's very confusing).<p>I'd have expected more from a Mozilla project.<p>You can see what I'm talking about by spoofing a mobile UA in your browser.
Programming a single-board computer in JavaScript is reasonable. But why embed the JavaScript in HTML? There's no browser, no screen, and no user.
"Make Real Things with Browser Technologies"<p>How is that better or so different than making real things in C ? What problem would it solve?<p>I get that js got very popular thanks to browsers, but does that mean we should use js for everything?<p>Seems like mozilla is just trying to salvage firefoxOS.
I am actually hoping for something like web assembly versioned modules with a p2p module registry to become popular for iot, blockchain, everything. Web assembly is actually a language-agnostic abstract syntax tree which can be JITd/compiled across architectures.
This is pretty cool, but imo raspberrypi is making micro-controllers obsolete. Why would you bother with such a limited environment when you can have a full linux environment + GPIO for like $10 more.