Fascinating announcement. I love the boards, they have an interesting mix of hackability and programability. And they are clearly in response to the Raspberry Pi success (although much of that is the price point, RasPi type systems have been available for $200 - $300 each for a long time and don't get the traction of a $35 system :-)
I found the Arduino Yun [1] to be perhaps the most interesting board (nominally $52) which is a very inexpensive Linux setup with an Arduino adjacent. You can even load sketches over WiFi. Its interesting because you have a much more sophisticated computation engine acting as a glorified serial port for an 8 bit micro.
The parallels to the original microcomputer explosion cannot be over looked. The Altair 8800 was introduced as a "real computer" using chips designed for calculators and embedded systems which engineers could build and use much more cost effectively than the minicomputers available at the time. Here we have Arduinos which have an approachable level of complexity and a cost (< $50 seems to be the trigger point) which makes them useful in the education/hacking role.
On the specific announcements the TRE is the most interesting to me as I've got BeagleBone Black systems (one is running the Hue lights in my office) to Arduinoess and Pies and the "sweet spot" is definitely somewhere in the middle. Not enough pins on the Pi, not enough compute oomph in the Arduino. A number of things then are a blend of an Arduino and a larger system, so the TRE, the Yun fit that niche which the TRE being a more programmable on the Linux side version of the Yun.
Comments
Fascinating announcement. I love the boards, they have an interesting mix of hackability and programability. And they are clearly in response to the Raspberry Pi success (although much of that is the price point, RasPi type systems have been available for $200 - $300 each for a long time and don't get the traction of a $35 system :-)
I found the Arduino Yun [1] to be perhaps the most interesting board (nominally $52) which is a very inexpensive Linux setup with an Arduino adjacent. You can even load sketches over WiFi. Its interesting because you have a much more sophisticated computation engine acting as a glorified serial port for an 8 bit micro.
The parallels to the original microcomputer explosion cannot be over looked. The Altair 8800 was introduced as a "real computer" using chips designed for calculators and embedded systems which engineers could build and use much more cost effectively than the minicomputers available at the time. Here we have Arduinos which have an approachable level of complexity and a cost (< $50 seems to be the trigger point) which makes them useful in the education/hacking role.
On the specific announcements the TRE is the most interesting to me as I've got BeagleBone Black systems (one is running the Hue lights in my office) to Arduinoess and Pies and the "sweet spot" is definitely somewhere in the middle. Not enough pins on the Pi, not enough compute oomph in the Arduino. A number of things then are a blend of an Arduino and a larger system, so the TRE, the Yun fit that niche which the TRE being a more programmable on the Linux side version of the Yun.
[1] http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&...