While investigating the RISC-V ecosystem, we noticed that there isn't an easy way for developers to build and test their software on native hardware without buying it.
So we integrated custom RISC-V servers in our bare metal servers infrastructure and made them available to the public to enable the building, porting and testing of more native RISC-V software.
A 4 Cores TH1520 with 16 GiB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC is 15,99€/month.
> While on the subject of smartphone driven hardware, experience has shown me that software has a much shorter mean-time-to-obsolescence than hardware. Any gizmo that needs an app to make it work will have the service life of a bluebottle, as Apple’s planned obsolescence orphans the app with an iOS upgrade.
This has been my experience too and I wish manufacturers would remove the requirement on having an app to use/configure the device.
Because of that, I try to make sure that such devices I design provides a basic web interface that makes it possible to setup and use the device.
This is impossible or at least difficult if the device is powered by a 8-bit MCU but with the dropping prices of beefier MCU and linux-compatible SoC this shouldn't be an issue in the future.
Of course, there is also the issue of remote services that those devices often depends on, even if it's not exactly necessary sometimes.
I'm using MQTT on my current project that involves interactive applications running on solar powered devices.
I'm using RabbitMQ for the broker, it supports MQTT too, this means I can use MQTT on the clients and the services on the backend only needs to understand AMQP.
I made a simple RPC system on top of it, unfortunately it's a homegrown solution as I couldn't use RabbitMQ RPC features with MQTT.
They are working on it, previously difficult intersections like the Nation roundabout are now easy to use by bike. Multiple "pain points" like those have been identified and have work done to it or are planned.
On the other hand, I still crap my pants when going through Bastille...
You are essentially right, though, have an efficient network requires good nodes and good paths, right now the paths are pretty good but some nodes are painful and to get around them, you need to leave the network.
It caused one graphical hang on my Mac and then it opened too many file descriptors, reaching the system limitations and I had to uninstall it and reboot.
There has been some bugs since Mavericks came out that still hasn't been fixed, mostly related to multiple monitors. That was an indication that it was going to be dropped.
It's fairly reliable but it's showing it's age right now.
