Posts made by Matthew Hartsuch

Im actually pretty happy with what the team has been able to accomplish, considering there are only 14 people on the team according to indigogo. As far as I can tell they Omega 2's are still set to ship out in December, and I have already received the survey. I ordered 5 omega 2's when I realized I could program them without a serial connection and that I just needed a 3v source of power, not to mention the user interface looks amazing. So they are going to cost me just over $6 a piece after shipping, I dont know about you but that is a pretty great price imo. I really don't care if Onion has media coverage, all that is just fluff to me. I also think if you compared this project to something like the C.H.I.P. you would see that the Onion team is actually moving reasonably fast. The CHIP team finished the kickstarter campaign in June just like the onion team, chip team said they were going to start shipping in december, but they didnt finish filling their orders until june. So I think that even if the Onion team could finish by February or August they would be doing well.

@luz you are right, except that this does have color changing features, I can do the moving rainbow function, or just have one straight color, there are 20 basic colors plus the rainbow and some flashing light features, and I can change how fast it moves

I wonder how hard it would be to do this with an esp8266?

I actually saw this post a few days ago, and I had previously been planning on having 5050 RGB strips in my room. I was planning on using the esp8266 but when I realized that it would take some time and programming understanding to control the rgb's, so I decided to use an LED amplifier because they generally cost less than $2 even with a remote. So I am going to use an arduino ir receiver to read the encoding from the remote and replicate it, so that the arduino/omega can send the ir signals to the RGB strips and I dont have to do much work.

@Decagrog Kaa looks pretty good too. I think I am going to stick with Eclipse though because they are a well know coding ide and they have a large backing.

@Kit-Bishop the disk and RAM mods seem like they could be really useful

@Michael-Vowles that's an amazing idea, is there any way you could connect more than one USB device, and is the VirtualHere something that you could receive the information to your phone

@Decagrog sounds like you are on the same level as me, it is hard to understand. I have a small background in C++, that's about it, but it seems pretty important for programming android. Python is good, my friend is always saying that humans should ditch english and other languages and only read and write python, so he thinks it is amazing. I dont know what projects you have in mind, but I was really planning on doing a smart home sort of thing, and incorporating onion devices into that. Make sure that you check out the esp8266 if you havent already because that is also going to make a big difference because of its sub $2 price point, so I can make very cheap wifi devices. I had never heard of many of the platforms that postscapes mentioned but I am planning on using Eclipse IOT, which is completely free and has a lot of features and support. Let me know what you think!

Sounds interesting, but what makes this platform any better than the major competitors, Brillo/Weave, IOT Eclipse, Apple HomeKit, etc, which have nearly unlimited resources and a reputation. I understand that you have built something for the onion, but it wouldnt be that difficult to duplicate for another platform.

Good question, honestly I dont know but if I were to guess, there is no desktop but it looks like we might be able to use ssh and that is why they are working so hard to develop the onion cloud for users. The Omega was not designed to have a visual interface, in the same way you wouldnt expect to plug the arduino into a monitor. I am sure that someone will find a way to flash other software for Onion, and it does say on the kickstarter page that you can run FreeBSD with Onion. So the Omega is a full computer but not in the traditional sense w/ a desktop and it will only replace the Raspberry Pi in situations where you wouldnt want to run a monitor. I dont know what you mean by "stream video" but you could hook it up to a webcam and have the onion stream that video to the internet. Also look up the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo because it is very similar to Omega, being an OpenWRT dev board.

@Lazar-Demin Thats awesome, are there any plans to have an android onion cloud interface?

Great job on the marketing and development! I do have one question, it seems like there was a huge amount of high quality marketing at the begining of the omega 2 project, but now that you are getting ready to ship out, Im not seeing a lot of buzz over the omega 2 aside from the general impatience on kickstarter and indigogo. I havent even seen coverage of Onion at maker faire nyc, the event you were promoting on facebook. Is there a reason you havent been promoting the produce over this most recent period? Are you just devoting all your resources to developing the produce and shipping the product A$AP? my other question is, how much of the development and marketing of this product do you expect the end users and the community to do? Do you expect many users to develop apps for the onion cloud, because I havent seen very much information about the kitchen, something that I am looking forward to hearing more about?