Sorry, but I've been away for awhile, but to answer your question, the main reason I'm thinking node-red and its bonescript nodes instead of "just programming in whatever" is basically two reasons:
1) My buddy has zero programming skills or experience, although he is expert in electronics having built several non-autonomous robots (RC controlled), and lives "off-grid" with a solar power system he's installed and maintains. He's also 80+ miles away so my "hands-on" help is very intermittent at best. 2) There are multiple buildings and distributed solar power systems, all covered by WiFi. While all his monitoring and control is pretty straightforward, the network code for multiple controller interaction and status reporting would totally blow him away. But node-red, and mqtt nicely offers a solution to this with "visual programming" (ever heard of LabView? I'm not a fan but it works well for scientists and engineers who aren't programmers). It seems to me he *is* the person the authors of such systems had in mind. Its just too bad that things aren't "smoother" out of the box. While I don't see node-red and bonescript as particularly useful to me, if it "just worked" after installing an image (or better if it worked with the images shipped in the eMMC) it would be easy to recommend as a starting point or alternative to Arduino (Arduino is a great starting point if one is motivated to learn programming but it falls down if you need networking). Frankly all this /sys/class/ file read/write and device-tree overlay stuff is a nightmare and nobody seems to care if changes break anything (it especially breaks the documentation such as it is). To expect/demand that a non-programmer jump into it to be able to do anything is absurd. I'm planning to down load the new 2016-02-21 image (or what follows by the time I actually get a chance to do it) and re-evaluate the situation, hopefully things are getting better. --wally. On Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 5:31:50 PM UTC-6, William Hermans wrote: > > Wally, what was the original purpose of this post ? E.G. what was it your > buddy wanted to accomplish ? If it's just twiddle a couple of GPIO's and > read an ADC or two. That can be done fairly easily in Nodejs, without even > any plugins. So not need for Node-RED, or C/C++ if not wanted. > >> >> -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
