Re: It's just a shame they hadn't heard of the Arduino
The previous product they launched (and seem to still sell) was an Arduino shield. Reading between the lines, I suspect this is a key staff\contractor churn issue. Whoever got the shield out of the door either knew enough about microelectronics to make it work or else knew someone who did.
That does not gel for me with someone who lets a project spiral into crash\burn territory just because and LCD or micro controller needed swapping for an alternate part. I've done design swap outs of PICs for Cortex M3 (fairly radical - essentially no code salvageable) and it only took a couple of weeks to break the back of the job. The fact that this company has someone with the (intensely wanky) title of "Happiness Manager" does not bode well for remaining engineering rigour in the upper echelons.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
