Arduino education
Seairth
Posts: 2,474
(continued from comments in a P2 thread)
I see this differently. Adding Arduino to Parallax's educational offerings makes a lot of sense! It's a huge, well-established ecosystem that Parallax should be a part of. After all, Arduino is a lot more than an Atmel chip. We are seeing all sorts of companies provide the Arduino "platform" with their own hardware (Microchip's chipKIT, Intel's Galileo and Edison, etc.). Why not Parallax too?
Even if Parallax did not create their own Propeller-based Arduino board, it still makes sense to be involved in the Arduino community. There is a constant stream of new people that need education. Many of those people will have heard of Arduino, even if they don't know what it means. Why should Parallax ignore those education opportunities just because they aren't the predominant hardware manufacturer? Further, it seems like a pretty good way to get your foot in the door if your long term intent is to take people beyond the Arduino to the Propeller (and eventually P2).
Ken,Ouch!Some of the things I'd have considered include a fully-integrated approach towards Arduino educational content
We can be grateful for small mercies I guess. That was close.
I see this differently. Adding Arduino to Parallax's educational offerings makes a lot of sense! It's a huge, well-established ecosystem that Parallax should be a part of. After all, Arduino is a lot more than an Atmel chip. We are seeing all sorts of companies provide the Arduino "platform" with their own hardware (Microchip's chipKIT, Intel's Galileo and Edison, etc.). Why not Parallax too?
Even if Parallax did not create their own Propeller-based Arduino board, it still makes sense to be involved in the Arduino community. There is a constant stream of new people that need education. Many of those people will have heard of Arduino, even if they don't know what it means. Why should Parallax ignore those education opportunities just because they aren't the predominant hardware manufacturer? Further, it seems like a pretty good way to get your foot in the door if your long term intent is to take people beyond the Arduino to the Propeller (and eventually P2).
Comments
However I do agree with you. Leveraging the Arduino community could be a very good thing.
But I would attack the problem from the other end. Not try to make an Arduino out of a Propeller but provide useful things to Arduino users as shields that happen to have Propellers on them.
As an extreme example, how is an Arduino user going to drive 32 servos. Easy, get a Propeller 32 servo driver shield and the "sketch" library to drive it.
I'm sure you can think of many other use cases for Propeller shields.
We might hope that eventually some of those Arduino users start to wonder what is going on. This is the same Propeller chip in all these places but it does all these different things. "How do I get to program that for myself?"
I and others have suggested many times that Parallax follow this same train of thought with the Raspberry Pi where the need for real-time control is even more pressing (Linux is not so good at that)
The Pi case is even more attractive as Pi users can run Propeller development tools on their Pi.
Obviously Parallax should do what they think is best, but in my experience people see a microcontroller and assume it's an Arduino. They shouldn't work in a way that can increase that confusion. Too many people have asked me about my "Arduino's" I'm showing off.
Shields is a good route probably. Including the Atmel chip in their products..... meh. Very, very meh.