Comment by flyingcircus3
2 days ago
The remote programming seems like a novelty aimed at hobbyists. If I have a deployment of remote devices, large or small, iterating on code on a device in the field is a recipe for disaster. How will you track the different versions of code on the various devices you have changed individually? If you need to directly change the code on a field device, doesn't that imply that you are unsure that the changes will work?
If the code needs to change, that is much safer to do in a controlled, low risk, nonproduction environment, where you will very likely have development hardware that has been optimized for ease of development/debugging. Once changes are tested and otherwise validated, an over the air update process would be used to send that new firmware image to the device. This way, your devices all can be on a single version of the firmware, meaning you can scale the deployment of that update to 10, then 100, then 1000 devices, etc.
The way the scripting engine is designed is such that it’s not really a problem to iterate in the field. If your code has an error, simply adjust and restart the script. Sure if you have the device hooked up to motors which could break things then of course you might want to do that in a controlled environment, but for applications like sensing that’s seldom a problem. The benefit you gain here is a very fast iteration cycle where you can easily test against real conditions, rather than in a lab where it might be hard to validate things. No need for heavy firmware testing, rolling out OTA updates, or worrying about bricking devices
In general I agree with you for complex projects, but these are typically where you can afford to have 2-3 engineers spend a year developing a specialised solution. Building infrastructure to safely roll out updates, managing data plans, handling compromised devices. All of this becomes a massive amount of work before you’re actually solving a problem for your business
The target audience isn’t necessarily engineering companies, but rather those that might have a few tech generalists. Their goal simply being to add some kind of sensing that might transform their product or service