photo – equinoxefr
@mpesce I am curious why you are using such a powerful processor for #mooresCloud – wouldn’t something like an Arduino be powerful enough?
— Stephen Kelly (@StephenKelly) November 22, 2012
This is something we hear a lot. People don’t understand why we’ve opted for such a powerful computer at the core of the Light.
Right at the very beginning, after my first meeting with Kean Maizels – who has since become our genius hardware designer – I was asked why I wanted such a powerful computer at the heart of the Light, when a simple microcontroller – a la Arduino – would be cheaper and easier to implement.
Here’s my response:
One of my guiding maxims in my work is a line from William Gibson: “The street finds its own use for things, uses the manufacturers never intended.”
The Light is a general purpose computing device. That is the reason the company is named MooresCloud.
It is intelligence: raw, unfiltered, capable of anything it puts its mind to.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t constraints. There always are.
But the Light is perhaps best thought of as general purpose computing device with a very low-resolution display.
A ‘smart’ appliance isn’t smart enough. A ‘smart’ appliance has a microcontroller capable of some pre-programmed tricks. The Light should be capable of anything thrown at it, up to the limits of its CPU and memory. Because we are creating a platform, we simply do not know, can not predict, and do not want to artificially limit the kinds of wild ideas people will implement on it. Uses the manufacturer never intended.
Creativity must be channeled, this is very true, and that means strong developer guidelines & resources, app review policies, and all of the subtle control-freakery that both Nintendo and Apple are famous for – without the underlying humourlessness. Creativity is handmaiden to chaos, no doubt about it, and people will want devices that ‘just work’. This creates a natural and fertile tension both in the design of the device and in its use.
I would like us to pick our points of compromise carefully. And the points upon which we will not compromise, because in them the whole of the design is reflected. I believe this is one of those points.
That what I thought in the beginning of September, at the very start of this whole process. I continue to believe it. Now, on the other side of the design process, I have some numbers to back it up. The difference in the Bill of Materials between an Arduino sophisticated enough to handle WiFi and a few basic REST commands, and our fully-fledged Linux ‘Lamp with a LAMP stack’?
Less than seven dollars.
Given this tiny differential in costs, the enormous gains in power and interiority – having a device that can think for itself, rather than just enact commands delivered by other devices – more than justify the increased component cost. This is the kind of feature creep we value in our design, because it multiplies potential disproportionately.