msarnoff

7 ms·

31.
by msarnoff 1y ago
I’ve done C++ on a Cortex-M0+ with 8KB of flash. Code size is a big issue. You have to disable a bunch of stuff (no exceptions, nothing that does dynamic allocation) but you can still use classes, virtual methods, templates, constexpr, etc.
32.
by msarnoff 1y ago
I always liked Realfield better. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/7zfbr3/realfield/
33.
by msarnoff 2y ago
My favorite bit of SML trivia: the infix function composition operator is “o” — lowercase letter o — so you can write ‘(f o g)(x)’ just like mathematical notation.
34.
by msarnoff 2y ago
When I was in kindergarten or very early elementary school (maybe 1991/1992) there was an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures with animated music videos for Particle Man and Istanbul. It still lives in my head today. I didn’t even know the
35.
by msarnoff 2y ago
That's been my primary usage of them. Another is to create a list of config file options (or command line arguments) like X(foo, int, "set the number of foos") X(filename, std::string, "input filename&
36.
by msarnoff 2y ago
A minidump on its own will not symbolicate functions from shared libraries linked in by your program. If you want fully symbolicated backtraces, you need a symbol file for every single .so your binary links against. I work in the embedded L
37.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I think, in a lot of cases, the choice between Buildroot and Yocto comes down to "which one does the SoC vendor support."
38.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Yocto error messages are absurdly awful. Hope you like fishing out the one gcc error out of 10,000 lines of garbage output. There's nothing as disappointing as starting a build, going out for a couple hours, and coming back to a termin
39.
by msarnoff 2y ago
The one thing I still don't like about Yocto is the setup process. You need to check out multiple layer repositories, make sure you check out the right commit from each repository (need reproducibility!), put everything in the correct
40.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Probably the same reason microcontrollers have OTP fuses—to prevent accidental corruption in the field or from buggy programming.
41.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Yup. mmc-utils is the way to go. Note that this change is irreversible once you send the command to finalize the settings. The single biggest thing you can do to improve the reliability of your embedded system is to use eMMC’s built-in hard
42.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Most eMMC chips (basically the chip version of an SD card) can be configured to work in pseudo-SLC (pSLC) mode. This halves the capacity but improves the write endurance by several times.
43.
by msarnoff 2y ago
re: the bitwise representation of NULL, evaluating a pointer in a Boolean context has the intended behavior regardless of the internal representation of a null pointer. See the C FAQ questions 5-3 and 5-10, et al. https://c-faq.c
44.
by msarnoff 2y ago
A similar effect, when animated with a function like `color = (y == (x ^ t))` for varying values of t, is called “munching squares.” It was originally written for the PDP-1 in the early sixties. I’ve seen it demonstrated on the Computer His
45.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Trivia: I looked through old sales brochures and did the math and calculated that the price of that HP 16500C new, adjusted for inflation, would be over $80,000. I paid $200, and I’m sure there are plenty that people have just given away fo
46.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I work on old systems with big parallel buses, so a while ago I bought a big HP 16500C chassis with something like 128 logic analyzer channels. It can handle a full 68000 bus no problem, but it’s cumbersome and unwieldy. (The X11 interface
47.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Is this where XaoS (long time open source fractal generator) got its name from? https://xaos-project.github.io/
48.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Numitrons are another option; they only require 5V to light the segments. They have a very strange, almost steampunk aesthetic (though Technology Connections is not a fan…) Unlike Nixies or VFDs, they emit a broad spectrum of light, so you
49.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Agreed. I bought a set of IN-18s for 30USD each back in 2009, now they go for over $100. I finally designed and built a clock for them about 3 years ago, and it sits right under my main monitor. They are captivating. I added “tasteful” (IMH
50.
by msarnoff 2y ago
4) Salvage a broken piece of test equipment like a frequency counter or multimeter. If the tubes light up, swap out the control circuitry for an Arduino or your microcontroller of choice. It’ll already have the high voltage DC supply and ma
51.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Not sure what equipment these were used in, but X, Y, Z for a digital readout on a CNC machine M, G, T are SI prefixes S, F, N, H are units It’s also likely that they have meanings in German or another language I’m not familiar with. Large
52.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I've only used it in an application where we ensure the data is ASCII-only. The only issue is that I've had to write a bunch of wrapper code around it (for looking up object properties by key, iterating over key/value pairs o
53.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I’m the original millitext creator and I’m very happy to see that someone made a new web-based generator. I wrote my original one in Ruby in 2008 and then stopped writing Ruby soon after that, leaving it to decay as the language’s ecosystem
54.
by msarnoff 2y ago
Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve done.
55.
by msarnoff 2y ago
If you want to go extremely lightweight, there’s jsmn: https://github.com/zserge/jsmn It does no dynamic memory allocation, which is a plus in constrained IoT/embedded applications. But it’s really only a tokenize
56.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I’ve never used it as an init replacement, but runit ( https://smarden.org/runit/runit.8 ) is great for supervising applications and services. - It’s built into BusyBox and is very lightweight - Configuration is dead sim
57.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I have 2 kids now (a toddler and a newborn) so I don’t get to hack on stuff anymore like I used to. I’m teaching my oldest about all the classic retro games though… if I ever get my Mac LC back from my parents’ house I’ll introduce him to G
58.
by msarnoff 2y ago
(Not a typo: 6800 with two zeros, not the 68000 of Mac and Amiga fame. The 8-bit 6800 is mainly famous for getting completely undercut by the 6502 and thus never making it into any home computers.)
59.
by msarnoff 2y ago
“A friend made a 1-bit synthesizer” Hi John :) https://github.com/74hc595/1-Bit-AVR-Synthesizer I also spent a good chunk of time reverse engineering and reimplementing the 6800 machine code* a while back. It’s pretty
60.
by msarnoff 2y ago
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.

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