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Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before

Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home? Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming! You too can spend weeks optimising your opcodes to squeeze them into mere bytes of memory! You'll need the rest of the 8kb available for lookup tables, because your processor is only running at 8mhz! You too can dream of a 'debugger' as you write and decode your own LED blink sequences! You too can draw your graphics by timing your own NTSC scanlines! You too can almost burn your house down using a soldering iron while sleep deprived! You too can almost lose your mind when you find out that the reason your program isn't working is because your resistors have heated up by one degree since you wrote the code! It's fun, the tooling to write the code can be as modern as you like, and the community is great. It isn't as hard as it can be made to sound, precisely because the constraints quickly force you to think small. When you're only trying to make a device for automatically traumatising your cat, the constraints only pose as much of a problem as the much looser constraints you might encounter solving a larger problem with more powerful tools, say, running a website. So the learning curve isn't that steep if you're already a programmer. http://arduino.cc http://arduino.cc http://hackaday.com http://hackaday.com http://electronics.stackexchange.com http://electronics.stackexchange.com And if that's still too sissy for you then just build stuff entirely in 555 timers: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/24/555-video-game/ http://hackaday.com/2011/02/24/555-video-game/

rogerallen 16y ago
this greybeard is looking forward to going retro videogame mad with gameduino. http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/ http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  Me too. I see he has done well with his kickstarter project. What on earth is he going to do with >$26,000? It doesn't cost that much to produce and ship the promised goodies to the backers, and it's not like he's going to need to spend a lot on marketing the thing. I guess he could just pay his living expenses for a bit while he works on it. What's the general etiquette/precedent on kickstarter when someone receives backing vastly in excess of their goal? Is it acceptable to just plough the cash into whatever you want?
  - rogerallen 16y ago
    That is just sweet, sweet profit for him as far as I'm concerned. As long as I get my product, I'm happy. He can spend it on hookers & blow if he wants. :^) But, then again I'm a first-time kickstarter user, so perhaps greybeards from there have a different opinion.
  - noonespecial 16y ago
    The etiquette is that you keep your promises to everyone who donated. This can be harder than it seems. There are some things that you can build 100 of for $5000 in a timely manner that you just can't build 1000 of for $50000 without a much larger lead time and a very different skill set.
    - JonnieCache 16y ago
      In this case, he is simply (I realise that this isn't actually simple) shipping out PCBs in antistatic bags to hackers, so he should be in a good position. I imagine that scales fairly well. Apparently the documentation is already done too. If you are sensible choosing who you go to, there are many shops in china who can pretty much do the whole job for you. There are even a couple of startups who act as intermediaries between manufacturers and hackers who have produced boards like this that they want to sell in small to medium runs, but I can't seem to remember their names.
      - noonespecial 16y ago
        If you are sensible choosing who you go to, there are many shops in china who can pretty much do the whole job for you. That's the skill set of which I speak. Getting a shop in China to actually produce a working product for you should be a major of its own at MIT.
timclark 16y ago
Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays! I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  >4 bits to your byte Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?
  - sp332 16y ago
    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History Time was, a byte could be anywhere from 4 to 12 bits, depending on the architecture. A "nybble" is half a "byte".
    - CountHackulus 16y ago
      7 bit bytes were an interesting time. Thank god the System 360 came around and decided to start standardizing things.
      - JonnieCache 16y ago
        I wonder how long it will be before I'm going around saying "In my day, our bits could only be in one of two states!" Maybe my kids say things like "We had to wait until our methods had been called before we calculated our return values! We couldn't rely on Just-In-Time-Reverse-Causality-Compilation to optimize our code! Get off my hyperlawn!"
        lutorm 16y ago
        Isn't a bit (BInary digiT) by definition in one of two states? Otherwise it would be a "tet" or a "quat"... ;-)
HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
the constraints quickly force you to think small That only works if you're building stuff for yourself. And then only if it's for a hobby. Otherwise you find yourself trying to (e.g.,) stuff a complex and somewhat safety-critical(1) control loop with 16-bit fixed-point division implemented in assembler into a processor with 1200 bytes of memory. (1) phone calls from the irritated client that your design caught fire and would have burned down his lab if he hadn't noticed the smoke at 5PM are generally not a good thing...

rogerallen 16y ago

this greybeard is looking forward to going retro videogame mad with gameduino. http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/ http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/

JonnieCache 16y ago
Me too. I see he has done well with his kickstarter project. What on earth is he going to do with >$26,000? It doesn't cost that much to produce and ship the promised goodies to the backers, and it's not like he's going to need to spend a lot on marketing the thing. I guess he could just pay his living expenses for a bit while he works on it. What's the general etiquette/precedent on kickstarter when someone receives backing vastly in excess of their goal? Is it acceptable to just plough the cash into whatever you want?
- rogerallen 16y ago
  That is just sweet, sweet profit for him as far as I'm concerned. As long as I get my product, I'm happy. He can spend it on hookers & blow if he wants. :^) But, then again I'm a first-time kickstarter user, so perhaps greybeards from there have a different opinion.
- noonespecial 16y ago
  The etiquette is that you keep your promises to everyone who donated. This can be harder than it seems. There are some things that you can build 100 of for $5000 in a timely manner that you just can't build 1000 of for $50000 without a much larger lead time and a very different skill set.
  - JonnieCache 16y ago
    In this case, he is simply (I realise that this isn't actually simple) shipping out PCBs in antistatic bags to hackers, so he should be in a good position. I imagine that scales fairly well. Apparently the documentation is already done too. If you are sensible choosing who you go to, there are many shops in china who can pretty much do the whole job for you. There are even a couple of startups who act as intermediaries between manufacturers and hackers who have produced boards like this that they want to sell in small to medium runs, but I can't seem to remember their names.
    - noonespecial 16y ago
      If you are sensible choosing who you go to, there are many shops in china who can pretty much do the whole job for you. That's the skill set of which I speak. Getting a shop in China to actually produce a working product for you should be a major of its own at MIT.

timclark 16y ago

Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays! I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.

JonnieCache 16y ago
>4 bits to your byte Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?
- sp332 16y ago
  https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History Time was, a byte could be anywhere from 4 to 12 bits, depending on the architecture. A "nybble" is half a "byte".
  - CountHackulus 16y ago
    7 bit bytes were an interesting time. Thank god the System 360 came around and decided to start standardizing things.
    - JonnieCache 16y ago
      I wonder how long it will be before I'm going around saying "In my day, our bits could only be in one of two states!" Maybe my kids say things like "We had to wait until our methods had been called before we calculated our return values! We couldn't rely on Just-In-Time-Reverse-Causality-Compilation to optimize our code! Get off my hyperlawn!"
      - lutorm 16y ago
        Isn't a bit (BInary digiT) by definition in one of two states? Otherwise it would be a "tet" or a "quat"... ;-)

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago

the constraints quickly force you to think small That only works if you're building stuff for yourself. And then only if it's for a hobby. Otherwise you find yourself trying to (e.g.,) stuff a complex and somewhat safety-critical(1) control loop with 16-bit fixed-point division implemented in assembler into a processor with 1200 bytes of memory. (1) phone calls from the irritated client that your design caught fire and would have burned down his lab if he hadn't noticed the smoke at 5PM are generally not a good thing...