Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff

Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by _hardwaregeek on Saturday June 08, 2019 @03:24AM (#20131111)

I've noticed that it's hard to get really great returns on maker projects. Maybe it's my impatience but software provides me something immediate that's cool and useful. Besides, debugging software is worlds easier for me than debugging circuitry. Also, why are microcontrollers stuck in the C++ world? Stuff like CircuitPython is changing that, but it's not that ubiquitous. I'd love an ergonomic and mature Rust ecosystem on Arduinos, or even a gasp JavaScript runtime. Shouldn't chips be fast enough for this? I'd love to run some basic web stuff on an Arduino.

Adafruit has been driving a lot of usable, rewarding electronics. They've been pushing LEDS (mostly WS2812 and APA102) in usable, prepackaged form factors. I really love their LED strips that are already diffused. They're beautiful and immediately usable. They're a little expensive, but I use their products to try out my ideas. But besides them there's not a lot of companies who make physical hardware appealing and available.

Side-note, why aren't there LED strips with a 3.3v logic level??? Almost all microcontrollers have a 3.3v logic level but APA102/WS2812 have a 5v logic level. Very annoying to convert.

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by sokoloff on Saturday June 08, 2019 @07:53AM (#20131904)

For battery powered applications, you want power efficiency, which often means using “portable assembly” (aka C/c++).

A lot of micro-controllers are run from batteries, especially high-volume products, so there’s always going to be a pull towards power efficient languages, even if your app has wall power available.

Second heeen’s comment on using 3V3 directly. I built Halloween costumes that ran directly off an 18650 powering the Arduino and driving the APA102 LED strings. No issues as the batteries ran from 4.2+ to 3.7 or less volts. If it was life safety, I’d care, but for blinkenlights, I’m willing to push outside the datasheet.

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by bonniemuffin on Saturday June 08, 2019 @12:31PM (#20133289)

I've been enjoying controlling LEDs via python with raspberry pi. There are good libraries available and it's easy to connect the LEDs to anything else you want to do in python.

Specifically check out bibliopixel for controlling LEDs in python. https://maniacallabs.github.io/BiblioPixel/

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by pbadge on Saturday June 08, 2019 @05:28AM (#20131480)

Hey I'm building a hardware company to address affordable housing 10x faster than existing approaches, read a bunch of your comments and they seem really insightful. Want to get coffee? Shoot me an email if you're interested at Pbadger27<at>gmail.com

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by madengr on Saturday June 08, 2019 @09:38AM (#20132304)

C++, hell, I’d say C. The more abstraction, the less reliability. My group would never use anything but C in our embedded projects. I think it’s the “move fast, break stuff” attitude of non-embedded developers that has poisoned everything.

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by aswanson on Saturday June 08, 2019 @11:48AM (#20133000)

C++ is a trash language; somebody said it's object orientation is like trying to make an octopus by stapling four more legs on a puppy. It allows devs to abstract to the point of absurdity and obfuscates intention. C is much more hygenic, imo.

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Re:Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff by heeen2 on Saturday June 08, 2019 @05:51AM (#20131574)

In my experience you can drive ws2811 with 3.3v, the signal gets conditioned after the first led.

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