Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you&#x27;d expect on HN.<p>Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn&#x27;t be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it&#x27;s a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there.<p>But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and just want to prototype some blinky lights or a flood sensor in your basement, now you&#x27;ve already got all the skills you need. You&#x27;re not producing a million units, you&#x27;re not worried about power so much as it&#x27;ll be plugged in. An evening with a soldering iron and your text editor and off you go.<p>Anyways. For prior art on this ecosystem, see janOS:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;janos.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;janos.io&#x2F;</a><p>which is basically stripped down firefoxOS which runs your app only (none of the launcher crud and such) in god-mode. It&#x27;s actually quite fun to go grab a $30 phone off of ebay, and have a nice programmable screen and sensor suite with wifi, gps, and cell connectivity. Indeed, I find it more compelling than this board they&#x27;re releasing, because I like taking advantage of the cheapness of mass manufacturing. The only downside is it&#x27;s difficult to impossible to break out any GPIO on phones.