"This turnkey off the shelf product isn't all that hard to do yourself-- just buy the components, make your own PCBs, do some surface mount soldering, then write all your own software, including the wireless mesh network stack."
It's not exactly self-healing in the same way 802.11s is, iirc it's your basic distance-vector routing protocol with all the usual problems that has.
http://www.thingsquare.com/start/
This is the Arduino business model-- easy introductory hardware for beginners. An actual hardware company wouldn't buy these for the same reason a router company wouldn't buy Cisco hardware and tape over the logos: there wouldn't be any margin.
I would characterize GGP's argument as more that this isn't unprecedented, and again, sure. Lithium cell-powered electronics have been around for decades, adding wireless isn't new. The point is that thingsquare is supposed to be easy. You buy their kit and press a button. You don't need to buy individual parts, or do assembly, or write glue code, or know what I2C is.
This is a common disease of the engineer's mind. "Why does anybody buy a car new? Just buy one used, and replace parts yourself when they break! Heck, why buy parts, when they're just metal and electronics? It should be easy enough to do your own aluminum casting, and wind your own electric motors." "You fool, you buy aluminum? Bauxite is everywhere! Just smelt it yourself, it's not hard." Etc etc.
My only argument for doing so is that everything is now extendable, whereas a "thingsquare' locks you into some particular engineer's design decisions that made sense then, but won't make sense for every use case now. Arduino sits right in the sweet spot of "easy to get off the ground" and extendable enough to use for all kinds of things", and that's largely why it is successful as a platform. This product sits so far off into "easy to get off the ground" territory that it misses too many use cases.
A board like this could be spun up for $25, shipping, parts, software, all in. I would be amazed (and very interested) if you could get an aluminum smelter up and running for $20.
All of these except the last are surprisingly easy these days. Digikey and Mouser stock virtually everything, custom PCBs are easy to order, and surface mount soldering can be done with a cheap hot air gun or toaster oven.
Arrow will ship parts overnight with a minimum order size of $20.
Aliexpress/eBay have made discrete semiconductors and passive parts nearly free.
Writing a bit of software is incredibly easy (versus what it used to be) with a good IDE and a solid toolchain.
It's truly a great age to be involved in hardware.
This area is in much need of improvement. Keil ARM-MDK, IAR, ect. aren't cheap.
But yeah, I've made MCU boards in my toaster oven, it's fun times for little non-RF projects.
The several gigabytes of stuff TI makes you install just to do hello world on their simple link products is kind of nuts though. There's nothing simple about it tbh.
But yeah, I've made MCU boards in my toaster oven, it's fun times for little non-RF projects.
The several gigabytes of stuff TI makes you install just to do hello world on their simple link products is kind of nuts though. There's nothing simple about it tbh.
With that said, of course the entire thing is still a lot of work and if the parts are super tiny... well...