Do you mean you took the effort to make it compatible with the Particle ecosystem, or did you simply copy&paste it? Although the Particle products are promoted as being 'Arduino-compatible' that does not mean you can use stuff one on one. There is a lot of different hardware involved that requires a different approach. The 'code-compatible' part is due to the same language that's being used.
I copy & pasted the hell out of it. What else do I need to do to make it compatible? Use the different (for no obvious reason) syntax for importing libs? Tell the web IDE to import the lib, wait 5 minutes, then refresh the page, see if it's imported, tell it to import again, wait 5 minutes and refresh again? Because if that's what you mean, that's what I did.
Code is posted here: particle_dryer - Pastebin.com if there is something that I'm doing that would work for 'duino but not for Photon, let me know.
To put it bluntly:"guess what, it's not an Arduino".
Then don't sell it as "arduino compatible"!!!!!
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A bit more sophisticated: there's so much more going on on this board than your good old Arduino that you have to account for. Different hardware, Wifi, network connectivity, and so on. It's similar to Arduino, it is, however, not an Arduino, so please don't try to treat it as such. There are a lot of similarities, for sure, but also quite a few (important!) differences which you can't simply ignore.
I don't care. If you sell a product that is arduino compatible, make it compatible. Make it transparent. The job of the Particle dev team is to abstract away that complexity. If I wanted to understand the ins and outs of Arm vs Atmel architecture development, then I'd buy fistfuls of chips for 1/10th the price of these microcontroller products. The whole reason these products exist is because guys like me don't want that complexity, but are perfectly happy to write a little C++. If I have to learn that complexity, your community will never grow from 5k users to the 300k users that Arduino has despite being "superior" in hardware, features, and price.
I'd agree with you on the fact that it's not as fast as it used to be. This will be looked at in the (hopefully not too distant future). Updating firmware, and adding/removing firmware has never been an issue for me. Do you have any steps we can take to reproduce these issues so we could try to fix them?
Take a look at @guru_florida's reply below, he gives a good sense of the problem. I'll try to do a screen cap tonight if I can.
Basically, any time I try to import a library to an app, it has a 50/50 shot of just freezing, then .... nothing ... then after 5 minutes I'll refresh, and sometimes see the library imported to the app, sometimes not. I'm using the adafruit_rgblcd lib and the piettech_dht lib, both libs do that.
Regarding the libs that don't work, the adafruit_dht lib worked fine on one app, but not on another. Why? There was no reason given, other than some-function-or-other is "private" (it's not).
That wouldn't be so bad, if I could use the local IDE, but that thing doesn't work at all.
That's a rather unhelpful statement. If you could tell us what isn't working, we might be able to help you out.
It doesn't have any useful functionality. Does that make the point clearer? I can't flash the Photon. I can't upload to the web, I can't download from the web. It doesn't even save files locally (as far as I can tell). Basically, it's just a text editor with a serial monitor, which I have one of - sublime - already. I don't see the point of it, since I can't flash firmware from it, and would rather have seen that engineering effort go into making the web IDE work, since that does seem to be able to flash the Photon (most of the time).
I'm on OSX Yosemite on a brand new Macbook pro, if that makes any difference.
No one is forcing you to use it. If you don't like the software they're providing, feel free to use your own toolchain. There are steps available which you can follow which will allow you to compile locally. Also, the Cloud isn't something you must use either, you're free to use the local cloud, or just use tcp/ip instead, should you have any obligations against that.
Once again, if the proprietors of this project want to see it grow, that is not an acceptable solution. Give me a single toolchain that works, and if I want something different because that's accessible, then fine. I don't want to learn TCP/IP just to program a microcontroller. No one else does either.
Rather than complaining about it, providing detailed information might help give us clues as to where things may have gone awry. Saying 'this doesn't work' won't help getting it to work. Rather, tell us what issues you're facing, and preferably a way so that we can reproduce them. If you find anything in need of improvement, do let us know what, and ways it can be improved, rather than:"this sucks".
I've detailed many things that "need improvement". So far, no one has said, "you're right, we'll fix it". Neither have any of the responses pointed to specific issues in my code or approach. Most of the responses I've seen seem to be blaming the user. Perfectly acceptable attitude if you don't like growing your userbase. Not my decision to make, though.
Okay, let's go crazy here, and try to imagine something, albeit it might be very unlikely. What if it is your code that's malfunctioning?
If it is my code, then why does it compile? Why does it flash? If it is my code then it's still Particle's issue because it isn't catching the problems and is allowing me to flash the firmware.
Because if it weren't, we'd have a couple of thousand people with the exact same issues, which I personally haven't encountered yet. I could be wrong though, and you've got perfect code. But then again, it wouldn't hurt sharing that, does it? We might be able to learn a thing or two from it.
This is exactly the wrong attitude to take. Because most (and I mean 90+%) of users will just throw a problem product in a drawer somewhere and you will never ever hear from them again. No one will bother writing you a "dear John" letter to let you know they've abandoned your platform and gone back to Arduino or just switched to RasPi. People don't bother.
I'll regale you with an anecdote to illustrate:
I recently (2 months ago) bought a pair of glasses from Lookmatic. I bought my previous glasses from them and they look nice and have good quality lenses. They were having a sale, so I thought "why not" and bought a pair using my stored prescription. The specs came, but the prescription wasn't right. So I wrote the CS team an email and sent them back. Got the replacement pair in the mail, and guess what -- still wrong! Know what I've done about it? Not a damn thing! Know why? Because I can't be bothered.
And that was for a $75 set of specs, so imagine what most people thing about a $15 microcontroller. They don't. If it doesn't work, it goes in the bin.
The point is that when you hear from someone like me -- someone who cares just enough to be grumpy and tell you about, it's the tip of the iceberg.
I can promise that I don't have perfect code, but it should at least run. It shouldn't have any effect on whether the Photon initializes after a reset.
This is generally known as "whining for the hell of it". Going as far to say this platform 'sucks' because you happen not to like aspects of it seems a bit harsh.
Not liking it and it not working are 2 different things. There are lots of things that I dislike about 'duino and RasPi, but I love those platforms, because they work. Functionality may be minimal, but at least it does what it says on the tin.
If complaining is your main goal of being here, I wholeheartedly suggest you find an alternative means of getting rid of your frustrations. There'll be a conflict of interest otherwise. You see, our goal is to help people. Meaningless complaining isn't helping anyone, and doesn't contribute much more than a bad atmosphere. Again, If you've got issues with something, or see room for improvement, then let us know in a constructive way, rather than just bashing about it.
If you do have serious questions you require help with, then by all means, ask away, that's why we're here.
If this minimal complaining along with lots of helpful feedback has you butthurt, then you need to find a different line of work that working with the public.
Well, if that's what you're going to compare against, try running it on your toaster, see if it'll run that. If it doesn't, it's probably the toasters fault? You can't just magically expect everything to work just because it did on an Arduino. Try running Windows on an Arduino, 'cause, you know, it works on my computer, so why wouldn't it work on an Arduino?
My toaster isn't "arduino compatible" ...
I wouldn't know, since you haven't given any steps to reproduce this. If you manage to do so, we might be able to fix this? Browser incompatibility springs to mind, but that's just a random guess. Without more details, there's little we can do.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.132 Safari/537.36
Is it in listening mode (blinking blue), or have you got a Serial.begin() in your code somewhere? If not, than it's not surprising that it doesn't work, since no Serial connection is opened to begin with. Also, installing the drivers as per the docs shouldn't hurt either, although I doubt that's the cause.
Code was posted before your reply, so if you really think I don't have "Serial.begin()" in the code, you could at least check.
I haven't yet had any issues with the forum whatsoever. Could it be that Chrome crashed for any other reason? Are you using an experimental version perhaps? Can you reproduce this, or was this a one-time thing?
That was a joke. Chrome crashed when I tried to upload an image. Happens from time-to-time. I keep using it though, because in spite of a few bugs it adds value to my life. Something to ponder.
In light of keeping this forum a nice place to be, I've changed your topic's title as well, since that didn't contribute anything meaningful. Please have a read through the above, if you haven't yet done so, and return with some to-the-point questions.
I'd really rather you didn't. I didn't include any swear words, and the title was attention grabbing. Now it's boring and looks like any other thread. Please change it back.
I get that you are trying to be helpful, but really the majority of your responses are just defensive. I'm not kicking your puppy, I'm telling you about my experience, trying to see if anyone else has the same problems (they do), and perhaps trying to get some assistance if I have screwed something up (which is entirely possible). You've neutered my ability to do the first two and haven't helped with the last one.
Thanks,
JR
unlike an Arduino IDE
