This is super exciting for anyone who has wanted to hack on hardware but always got hung up on stuff like getting wifi shields, hooking batteries, etc. before even getting to coding. I'm getting one of the beta units (I've known one of the founders for a while) and am psyched to start hacking on it.
As a hardware noob, the promise of the arduino has been that you can build anything(!) with it - which is also the downside. I've always felt like the setup to get pieces of hardware battery powered and communicating with each other was much higher of a hurdle than it should have been and mostly lost interest before getting to build what I actually wanted. Plus, an arduino board + wifi shield + whatever else makes it super bulky.
This feels like an arduino with smart defaults - like a Rails for hardware.
As a hardware noob, the promise of the arduino has been that you can build anything(!) with it - which is also the downside. I've always felt like the setup to get pieces of hardware battery powered and communicating with each other was much higher of a hurdle than it should have been and mostly lost interest before getting to build what I actually wanted. Plus, an arduino board + wifi shield + whatever else makes it super bulky.
This feels like an arduino with smart defaults - like a Rails for hardware.