Hacker News Reader

Comment by danjayh | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see Linux used in a project like this, it feels like hitting a trim nail with a sledgehammer. I hadn't seen mbed OS prior to this article, and after perusing the documentation and checking license (apache), I have to say I'm pretty stoked about it. mbed os seems to be far better suited for tiny / lightweight devices than Linux ... anybody used it in an actual project? Have any thoughts to share?

View on HN

I've used it a lot. It's basically Arduino but designed by people who actually know what they're doing.

There are also a much wider variety of boards available:

https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/

Some of them are really cheap, e.g. the ST Nucleo boards are about £6.

The only reason I can see anyone would choose Arduino over mBed is if you really need native 5V. One could also argue that while the Arduino "IDE" is totally awful in almost every way, at least they have one. mBed currently only has an online IDE which is powerful but slow and online, or Yotta which is nicely written but currently command line only, and only supports a few boards.

the little microprocs I'm dealing with, couldn't even run Linux (256kb storage, and 32kb ram). I'm using it, but only for prototyping so far. Works nice enough so far, except that I'm not very good at C/C++! The ecosystem their setting up around their yotta tooling is very promising.

I've been doing a bit more than poking around in this space, and I'm curious what your language of preference and hardware specs are? Something like an esp8266? Or smaller?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com