[cstone]

This is a very hacker-unfriendly device. I wouldn't buy one.

The SDK's compilation tool doesn't invoke a compiler; it uploads your code to a service running off of http://174.129.29.50:8080.

The Arduino is fantastic because the bootloader is open-source, the hardware is open-source, and it's easy to find out full information about the hardware and pull the MCU datasheets yourself.

[brk]

How can you call it "hacker unfriendly"? The thing is designed to be hacked, that's the whole point of it.

The Arduino and this are two totally different classes of devices.

For staters, this appears to be very much about the hardware. I wouldn't expect it to be open source, just like the iPhone or Motorola Droid you can develop your own apps for doesn't have open source hardware. You don't actually have to be granted access to 100% of the codebase and hardware layout for a product just to develop a neat application around something.

I saw this and immediately thought of 5 or 6 cool uses for it so I bought one. Sure, if I was going to build some kind of a product around this, or develop an app that was going to be my retirement income, I'd want a little more information about the company and their licensing models. But for a $150 hackable gadget, this thing is one of the coolest toys I've seen in a while.

[acgourley]

I think it's a pretty good idea, but the ideal solution would be both a CAAS and the opened sourced toolchain that worked on at least one open source platform. Doing that is probably easier than releasing something cross platform like arduino, and for most people is going to be easiest to use.

[drivebyacct2]

I'd love to hear a counter to this. I was really close to buying one...

[erohead]

Hi Guys, Eric from inPulse here. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for people to develop for inPulse. That's why we've built a cloudcompile service. No messing with DLLs, drivers and other annoying parts of embedded coding.

I think we've succeeded! In our beta testing, users were able to go from downloading the SDK zip to loading their first app on inPulse within 5-8 minutes. I think that's pretty impressive for a startup hardware biz.

If you'd like to setup the arm-gcc toolchain and compile your own apps, absolutely no problem! We'll have instructions online shortly. If you need them faster, just email [e-mail]