Hardware geeks!

[joppiesaus]

GEETTT HYPED!

A microcontroller that's a USB stick too which runs javascript!

Yeah. They have 70 hours left and I want to give the project more attention, because I'd be glad if they could push it to 60k gbp for the next stretch goal.

It's a whole new world of possibilities, even with all the microcontrollers out there.

[Nuke]

hype: no, and heres why.

first off the point of a dev board is to give you the bare minimum of parts of which base an electronics project. this board is a very bare minimum, pretty much just an mcu, crystal and a voltage regulator (and same can be said about earlier arduinos). it doesn't do anything new. you get an arm mcu with native usb. this is the direction arduino seems to be going in its newer boards, and they arent the only ones. with declining price of arms, using something like a pic or avr would not offer much of an advantage unless you are making a big production run. most of these newer mcus support usb natively.

another major selling point is its size. its small, this can be useful in some situations, such as when you are bread boarding, or for ultra portable applications. but again, this has been done before.

the last thing that this brings, javascript, is not really desirable on a mcu platform. arduino gets a lot of flak from pros about its libraries being bloated and slow. its true, they are slow, they have a lot of overhead to make sure they work as advertised, and newer users certainly appreciate it. as slow as they are its still native c, and would run circles around a java script interpreter. another popular board which pushes another popular scripting language (were talking about the pi and python respectively) is very good at making very slow programs, unless you code on it in c/++ like i do.

finally, if learning is your thing, obscurity is the wrong direction to go. you want something with a big community and lots of tutorials. i know for a fact a lot of the supported dev boards they show already work on arduino, and libraries exist for them. they want another 10k for usb hid support, my arduino leo has that and i didnt have to spend more than a couple hours getting it to work, idk if its worth siphoning another 10k pounds out of the kickstarter community. i think a lot of these kickstarter projects are just reinventing the wheel at everyone else's expense.

[joppiesaus]

I removed this text because I don't want to quote super large texts

You have some good points.

I've never thought about that either.

Nor do I know electronics.

They have a pretty neat amount of tutorials here: http://www.espruino.com/Tutorials

Not super many, but at least they're good.

I like for the fact that you can start very quickly with an espruino, and you don't have to compile anything.

That said, if you have some network stuff, you can just give it commands very quickly.

I know, this is nothing new, you can program this yourself... But javascript makes it easier.

It's not very fast, but it doesn't need to be fast. What's fast is how quick you can program things.

I think what's really new is that it's easy. And I like easy. That's why I backed it(and of course, I want to meet microcontrollers 'n stuff).