Hey all a image a combination arduino and reasberry pi with a full .NETstack; sounds cool right?
I spotted this browsing the internet and thought I would spam it on IRC and here 
Seriously though, if the above (minus the spam part sounds interesting), check this out:
sounds cool right?
No. That’s a bit stupid IMO.
Here’s my reaction when reading the project page:
Meadow is the world’s first, modern, secure, professional IoT platform.
Hum???
It combines the best of all worlds; it has the power of RaspberryPi, the computing factor of an Arduino
No, this is just a buffed arduino. While having an STM32 is actually nice, their software stack will take the majority of the processing power. This is nothing close to the raspberry computing power. This statement is plain wrong.
Meadow is a full-stack IoT platform. Out of the box, it gives you everything you need to build sophisticated IoT solutions with very little effort.
If you happen to be working with hardware they actually support out of the box then yes, but this isn’t always the case.
if you need to create a new driver, Meadow comes with protocol abstractions and a driver framework that make adding new peripherals a breeze.
That means very little hardware control, if you want to interface with different chips or chips that don’t fully implement the standard, implement a variation of the standard or even little-used standard features, then you’re in trouble.
Meadow makes it easy to add artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive services
That made me kek. Their definition of easy to add artificial intelligence is just being able to connect to an AI cloud service.
Later they say,
By leveraging Meadow’s 32-bit microcontroller, you’ll be able to run some AI algorithms directly on Meadow without connecting to an external service.
Just, no. You won’t be able to do any real-world AI processing.
It has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth , a ton of IO including digital, analog, I2C, SPI, Serial, and even CAN, so you can even connect it to your car!
The support for CAN actually surprised me but that wouldn’t be that hard to implement with an STM32 or an external chip.
Now, we have this image.
Let’s go point by point
In sum, there is a very limited use for this product. It only makes sense to buy this if you are a .NET developer with little C/C++ knowledge who want to try out IoT as a hobby and doesn’t mind spending this amount of money.
I can see some uses for this project, and I like the graphic libraries they are shipping with it, however I’ll stick to Arduino for my own experiments, it has a huge supportive community of developers behind it and there already are countless modules to download if you want to interface your board to other components, and it’s very easy to learn, especially if you’re already a .NET programmer. This made me raise an eyebrow though:
Are you tired of messing with tooling and languages from the 80s?
Do people really care if the language they’re using is old? Especially when it’s a well designed fast and powerful language that keeps receiving updates in the form of new standards to this day? You don’t need the exclusive features of C# in most IoT applications as far as I know, languages like C++ give you much more control and performance, shouldn’t that be the main focus in tiny specialized devices?
everything is AI ready, as in thatnothing is AI ready and we know beans about it
This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.