Why not both? I don't see Mynewt having massive appeal to the larger
Maker community since the community is very focused on Arduino for a
number of valid reasons, but it will appeal to a certain type of person
in that extremely diverse community. It's the right tool for some jobs
and not for others. It won't replace Arduino and I don't think that is
anyone's goal.
Coming from the maker community myself, I appreciate the production
focus on Mynewt which isn't present in Arduino. Many of the design
decisions that went into the platform are clearly based on real world
experience shipping and maintaining devices, such as version control and
unit tests and simulation. I don't think your average Arduino user is
the target here (feel free to correct me, and I'm only thinking out loud
expressing my own perceptions), but more for the 0.1-1% of people who
want to move up to something they can maintain and produce or sell.
I'm approaching Mynewt primarily as a potential user and product
designer attracted by a fully open source BLE stack, but I'm also
interested to see if some of the more adventurous or curious customers
take the bait and dig into it themselves. Mynewt allows me to design
products that are fully open, which gives people in the maker community
options they might not have with proprietary code from the various
silicon vendors.
I'm trying to make a case for Serial for both sides of the equation,
though. I can integrate USB CDC from free (with an MCU that has a USB
PHY on board such as the SAMD21) to under $1 with a dedicated USB/Serial
converter (which would be necessary with the nRF5x chips with no on chip
USB). Free to under $1 de-bricking and flashing is very compelling for
a significant reliability boost, even on cost sensitive devices, and
worth the extra 2-3KB flash. I see this solving real world production
issues since you are less likely to have bricked devices. A nice side
effect, though, is that the cheap to manufacture HW also becomes more
maker friendly just in case people do want to poke at it themselves! It
seems win win to me, and can solves problems for both camps.
On 08/06/16 20:17, David Moshal wrote:
Thanks Wayne, that's very interesting, I think it helps explain the
disconnect here.
I understood David Simmons to be suggesting that Makers (like me) are
the target end-users,
i.e: that MyNewt would be an alternative to, say, Arduino (and why not).
However, in your use-case, you are the end-user of MyNext, and Makers
are your end-users, no?
i.e: a layer lower in the stack. So, in that case MyNewt would be
positioned as an alternative to an RTOS (or no RTOS) for embedded C
programmers building devices for Makers.
So, if I may, I'd suggest that we step back and ask Sterling who
exactly he envisages as the end user of this project:
Makers, or embedded C developers building devices for Makers?
David
