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I would like to learn about the background of the project developers. Not their names and where they are from, but how they got the knowledge to realize project
by jansan 3y ago
I would like to learn about the background of the project developers. Not their names and where they are from, but how they got the knowledge to realize projects like this. Are they hobbyists who work in unrelated fields and just learned this from books and videos? Do they have degrees in electronics and do work like this in their jobs?
Stuff like this looks almost superhuman to me and I would like to know how one can get the abilities to pull this off.
- lstodd 3y agoI know nothing about this project devs, but I made a framebuffer/driver for my old EGA monitor out of an ARM Cortex-M7 devboard, some SRAM pulled out of old 486 boards (cache memory they were) and a level converter. It did not go as far as being worthy enough to be published, but it worked. It is not particularly superhuman, me not having any degrees or related work, just some years playing with electronics as a hobby, then taking old IBM EGA manual and designing the thing in a couple of evenings. It's not rocket science :) However nowadays even rocket science isn't. Everything is pretty simple, especially if you throw sufficiently large FPGAs on the problem.
- jacquesm 3y agoYour skills are valuable.
- jacquesm 3y agoUsually they do this sort of thing professionally and they use these skills in their hobby projects as well. An electrical engineering degree would be a good start to acquire these kind of skills, alternatively a hardcore HAM or very serious hardware hobby.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI worked with a software engineer at Apple that played with FPGAs on the side. So maybe as a hobbyist it is doable.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoFPGA stuff isn't hard to pick up at all. At least to do basic stuff. (I got as far as building my own HDMI-outputting simple video chip with a character generator, tied to a RISC-V processor, addressing SRAM, booting a primitive OS. But I kinda fizzled out after that when I ran into SD card interfacing)
- jacquesm 3y agoDefinitely doable! There are neat little FPGA kits from Digilent that are a good starting point for hobbyist entrance into this realm. The hardest part for people coming from the software angle is that you tell an FPGA what to be, not what to do.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThe creator is a friend of mine and an and on-off coworker for 20+ years. Software guy. SWE background. Mostly unrelated fields though we did both work at Google in the Nest division with embedded LInux stuff, but on the software. No degree in electronics, taught himself the hardware end of things and the FPGA end of things. Not superhuman. Just really passionate about the C64. You can do it, too.
- chrismcb 3y agoThe basic answer is "yes." Some of them are hobbyists, some are professionals.