I'm ridiculously excited about this. The original tessel was an amazing step away from the dichotomy of Arduino | Embedded Linux, allowing you to focus on what makes your project different instead of fiddling with breadboards or operating systems. Sound familiar, Rails / Django devs?
The coolest thing is that it's a fairly modular product, instead of being some custom monolith that tries to solve every problem for you. It hooks into npm and the command line, and runs JavaScript.
Unfortunately, the Tessel1 ran Colony, a custom implementation, which didn't do well with things like Bluebird promises (Q promises worked, but slowly) or generators or observables. Most hardware projects are actually reactive systems, and those are difficult to build with an Arduino. Coordinating callbacks is very painful.
I can't wait to get my hands on a Tessel2. Hardware has been needlessly hard for too long. Glad to see hardware hackers adopting more hard-won solutions from the past 6 decades of software engineering.
The coolest thing is that it's a fairly modular product, instead of being some custom monolith that tries to solve every problem for you. It hooks into npm and the command line, and runs JavaScript.
Unfortunately, the Tessel1 ran Colony, a custom implementation, which didn't do well with things like Bluebird promises (Q promises worked, but slowly) or generators or observables. Most hardware projects are actually reactive systems, and those are difficult to build with an Arduino. Coordinating callbacks is very painful.
I can't wait to get my hands on a Tessel2. Hardware has been needlessly hard for too long. Glad to see hardware hackers adopting more hard-won solutions from the past 6 decades of software engineering.