Re: [DIYbio] Re: Does Anyone Know Of A Submersible Arduino/RaspberryPI Compatible Spectrometer?

On 9/6/17, Cory Geesaman <co...@geesaman.com> wrote:
>  there's no way Python is
> faster than c

I believe you misunderstood the following :

>>  basic python
>> coding which is probably faster to iterate than C.

This means implementing (coding) is faster to iterate i.e. faster to
write and rewrite, i.e. can be coded rapidly and bugfixed rapidly.
Not talking about execution time which for the hardware had
surprisingly small overhead, i.e. really good code size and code
execution time.

> Python isn't even a real language,

I don't know where you're going with that statement, especially in the
context of a comparison to the Arduino language.  Any real-world
design which compromises on using Arduino hardware wouldn't use the
Arduino language because of the many drawbacks, especially when power
efficiency is a design consideration.  If you want to nitpick that
micropython still uses bytecode, keep in mind that data logger-type
commercial products implemented with embedded Basic have been released
-- and sold -- decades ago (i.e. quick google turns up,
http://www.hth.com/filelibrary/txtfiles/losa.txt ) which has as a
listed example, and this was implemented back in the late 1990s:

-- quote --

 A BS2SX Based weather station that can monitor the following:

 - Wind Speed (and peak gusts)
 - Wind Direction
 - Rainfall Accumulation
 - Barometric Pressure
 - Temperature (at up to four locations)
 - Relative Humidity
 - Current Time & Date

 The software will also support a keypad and LCD user interface,
 and a PC-Board Kit is available.

-- end quote --

If you'd like many more examples of this type of application, just
search for something like, "basic stamp weather station" since it was
a very common application and project at the high school level.

I'm not suggesting use of embedded Basic (or those boards).  Just
throwing out this comparison to what was solidly accomplished in the
90s (and with 1990's hardware) vs. the inefficiencies, aka sacrifices,
in board designs and software of today (i.e. "just use adafruit and
Processing-IDE), if there's any suggestion that micropython has too
much overhead or "isn't a real language".

Another downside of Arduino hardware is that, as a proprietary
platform (which has some of the worst platform lock-in itself), it is
obsolete nowadays.  Whatever hardware you choose should have a healthy
product roadmap.  If compromising with design choices enough to
consider Arduino, you might as well compare Lego hardware and Lego
software (which is.. ironically enough.. very similar to a Basic stamp
design).  Whatever design you choose, for an embedded device, you
should be able to easily fix or improve the code 10-15 years from now,
without having to throw everything away and reimplement from scratch
because the vendor is gone or the development system no longer runs.


--
## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
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