The more I look at this the more interesting it gets

[G+_Michael Heinz]

The more I look at this the more interesting it gets.

 

I'm worried that it will end up the same way every other project that claims to let you code without, you know, actually coding but the hardware looks really sweet for a solder-challenged person like myself.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1762626887/cubit-the-make-anything-platform

[G+_Jeff Gros]

This looks like a fun little kickstarter project. It looks like a mixture of little bits, arduino and (hopefully) very full featured flow chart software.

 

Basically it just looks like a PIC32 with all the pins going out to headers. Then you plug in the cubit compatible devices which will ignore pins it doesn't need. This will likely limit the number of devices you can control to 5 (you'll need one port for debug). I'm not sure how well this will work in practice but it is a neat idea. The problem is that the processor may say it supports 4 UART channels, for example, but you cannot use them all at once because they share pins with something else, like SPI or CAN Bus. The Cubit staff will have to plan this carefully to ensure they can maximize their peripheral usage so they can support all the things they want to plug in. The good news is that PIC32 has a crossbar switch, so this will help alleviate pin issues to a degree.

 

The PIC32 is fairly decent as far as processing power. I prefer ARM to MIPS architecture if you are going for 32 bits but it gets the job done. The main reason they are using it is probably for the connectivity. PIC32 parts tend to have an impressive amount of peripherals. The crossbar switch doesn't hurt either.

 

That aside, all the magic will be in the software, but there will be limitations. I've never used the arduino "sketch language" before, but my understanding is that you trade off complexity for ease of use. Particularly the peripheral registers are hidden from view and you use library calls instead to access the peripherals. This works for small projects, but anything complex or time critical could get overwhelmed.

 

I think that the flow chart software will go even a step beyond this. Users won't have to learn a sketch language, they just drag and drop functional blocks and connect them up. In this case, you will be locked in even further than with the sketch language. The good news is that since they would provide the devices to connect, this will keep complexity down. The bad news is that you will be dependent on their implementation.

 

Your choices for that temperature sensor in the example video are "Raw", "F", "C". Once you get the data, does their software have a good mechanism to feed the data into a digital filter? Or do they filter it for you? The magic will be in the software...