Perhaps there is some (elitist) disinterest floating in the air, maybe due to empathy being wanting. I also think this is an uninteresting and quite badly-done thing, but whoever did it had fun in the process and learned a couple of things in the process, and I think this deserves a lot of appreciation.
What you're probably trying to communicate (maybe in an overly-honest way) is that there is a great disparity between the function being performed and the power of the hardware there. The main obstacle the author encountered was his lack of knowledge related to electronics and embedded systems, not the scarcity of resources or the difficulty of the problem (or both) that are typically considered hacky. This is very much equivalent to writing the well-known Currency Converter application in Scala. On a quad-core system. You don't see much of that on HN.
I know people in my field (embedded systems) who, like me, are somewhat embittered by the "Arduino" and the "RPi" culture. The rate at which I have to explain why something is inadequate for mass manufacturing, unsafe, sub-optimal or outright disastrous to people who think transistors have holes in them but are really convinced <something> is simple because they did it in node.js, on their PIs, with a couple of wires and arduino shields hooked up, has probably tripled since the Pi became popular. But not everyone who is happy about how a small hack they did works is also an arrogant asshole, and we should probably remember that before bashing them.
What you're probably trying to communicate (maybe in an overly-honest way) is that there is a great disparity between the function being performed and the power of the hardware there. The main obstacle the author encountered was his lack of knowledge related to electronics and embedded systems, not the scarcity of resources or the difficulty of the problem (or both) that are typically considered hacky. This is very much equivalent to writing the well-known Currency Converter application in Scala. On a quad-core system. You don't see much of that on HN.
I know people in my field (embedded systems) who, like me, are somewhat embittered by the "Arduino" and the "RPi" culture. The rate at which I have to explain why something is inadequate for mass manufacturing, unsafe, sub-optimal or outright disastrous to people who think transistors have holes in them but are really convinced <something> is simple because they did it in node.js, on their PIs, with a couple of wires and arduino shields hooked up, has probably tripled since the Pi became popular. But not everyone who is happy about how a small hack they did works is also an arrogant asshole, and we should probably remember that before bashing them.