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Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get yourself an ES

Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get yourself an ESP32 and you can talk directly to the metal with no OS to get in your way. Get two, they only cost a few bucks each. > I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". The answer to that is astonishingly complicated. It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong question.

pjc50 7y ago
> It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong question. No, I see this argument a lot on electronics.stackexchange and I think it's over-used. That's their question. They have some larger objective in mind, which it may be useful to know; if they want to control the light from UI on the PC then that's a natural way of phrasing the question. If you want to do this over the ESP, sure, then you've got to get networking involved, and that's how you end up with all the usual IOT disasters. How do you "securely pair" an ESP32 with a PC? Again it involves a huge amount of software. Whereas if you just had a wire you wouldn't have to worry about security. Answers of the form "buy a different computer" or "install a different OS" serve to make the answerer feel smug without usually helping the questioner at all.