Linux 'internet of things' gizmo ships
Ninja Blocks has begun shipping its eponymous Linux gadget designed to interact with sensors and automate your world. The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on …
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Too expensive.
Rasberry pi can be retrofitted with this stuff and probably cased in rubber for half the price.
Why is this so expensive???
Re: Too expensive.
They have said they plan to look into supporting the Pi as a hardware platform.
They're currently based off the beaglebone, which costs ~£60, so basically you're paying £60 for the beaglebone, plus £40 for their custom hardware interface board, the 3d printed case, and access to their cloud server
Re: Too expensive.
Why is this so expensive???
... perhaps they had to pay for CE approval!
Re: Too expensive.
£40 for the interface hardware and casing sounds about right, especially as it's a rapid-prototyped case and very low volume interface PCB.
You can pay over £20 for low volume bare PCBs in that kind of size, so it's not exactly extortionate.
Re: Too expensive.
>Why is this so expensive???
QA?
[Ducks]
I've been using BSD to run little bits and bobs ...
... for over thirty years. Does that count?
Probably not ... greenhouse and barn plcs aren't "cute".
Hardware is too expensive
You need something based on this:
Non-chinese Linux firmware available from here OpenWrt
I suspect there's only a small amount of effort required to bring out the GPIOs to do the interfacing required. And that has a wireless adaptor in it too!
Not really from Australia...
This can't be an Australian project unless they're bending the Kickstarter rules a bit. From the Kickstarter T's and C's, you need to be based in the US and supply a US social security number to register a project.
Naw.
Now if it was managed by your own private server, that'd be more interesting.
Still, at least it isn't made or sponsored by "your property is my property and you can't sell it" Braben.
Yay
Another finish it yourself product from the world of Linux. Although this will be cool for geeks for 10 minutes like the sharp Zaurus was it will never be a successful product. For success I'm afraid you have to do the work, finish the product and then ship it. For examples, look at companies like Apple or Sony who literally do polish off their products before selling them.
Re: Yay
You probably don't know where the kitchen is in your house, nor why anyone would want one.
I don't see why Raspberry Pi-grade devices need 'the Cloud' to co-ordinate their functions. Surely a mesh network with SNMP is all that's required... but I suppose then Ninja Blocks couldn't lock you in and harvest and sell your appliance data to marketeers, could they?
Actually
First of all I agree on that processing the data in the cloud is a bad idea.
However the problem lies within stupid customers. They just aren't able to access their data via some sane way. They can't point their browsers to an IP address or an mDNS hostname. And even if they could, many of them don't have IPv6 yet, so they will not be able to access it from their mobile phones.
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