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Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

ryanwaggoner.com

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Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#51

Post by ybot »

agentultra wrote: post #49

Arduino's are neat, I have one too. One caveat to be aware of is that Processing isn't very portable yet; so it's a bit of a lock-in there. TI has some neat micro-controller kits in the same vein as the Arduino you should google for. Cheap too.

TI's new uC platform is the MSP430 LaunchPad. They're only $4.30 shipped!

Not as user friendly, though, so if you're new to this kind of thing, the Arduino might be a better place to start.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MSP430_LaunchPad_(MS...

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#52

Post by cromulent »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5
replicatorblog wrote: post #2

Ryan, I really like a lot of your posts, but some of them feel a little light for HN. This one could be summarized as "I got an Arduino, Physical products are really cool". Kind of bummed its #1 right now. Nothing personal against you, just that personality rather than content seems to be rocketing things up the page.

That's fair, and this is the thing I worry about the most with my blog. Part of the problem is that a bunch of my readers aren't technical, so I sometimes wonder how deep I should go on technical posts. As far as HN goes, I submit a lot of the stuff I write, but only because a fairly large percentage seems to find some traction here, so I guess people enjoy it. That's not necessarily proof that it's quality content,…

As someone who grew up on Dick Smith's Fun Way Into Electronics kits [1], I love the Arduino. I can see three Arduinos on my desk as I type. I'm not so smart with electronics, but it is a lot of fun, and it's a golden age for this kind of thing.

[1] Dick Smith is a successful Aussie entrepreneur who created a chain of hobby electronics stores and sold the chain when it had (I think) 200 employees and he couldn't remember all their names, so it wasn't so much fun anymore.

When Redhead matches was bought by overseas interests, he created Dickhead matches in protest and sold them in Aussie supermarkets.

He jumped a double-decker bus over 15 motorbikes when I was a kid, parodying Evel Knievel. He was my hero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_(entrepreneur)

He recently created the Wilberforce award - "$1 million to go to a young person under 30 who can impress me by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy."

http://dicksmithpopulation.com/wilberforce-award/

"It has become obvious to me that my generation has over exploited our wonderful world – and it’s younger people who will pay the price."

Edit: He's also a founder and patron of the Australian Skeptics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Skeptics

Edit 2: Picture of the bus jumping the motorcycles

http://www.dropbears.com/m/models/specials/busjump.htm

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#53

Post by follower »

_bfhp wrote: post #50
follower wrote: post #12

Small world. I actually worked on some of the content for the Inventor's Kit guide. When you read "You want orange, you want teal, you want aubergine!" that's me. :) Happy to receive feedback on the guide as you work through it. I was introduced to the Arduino nearly four years ago and actually earn income now from Physical Computing related teaching, writing and project development. Creating tangible things and esca…

I already bought an Arduino, but now I want all this stuff from the inventor kit! Should I just buy parts as I need, or are there any other kits like this?

I'm most familiar with the SparkFun kits and I don't think all the same components are available in a separate kit without the Arduino.

Although, I would say, I don't think you can have too many Arduinos. :D

You can buy the individual components separately but sometimes the bundled price is less.

This kit still has the Arduino but might be another option with a smaller selection: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

Or if you want to go all out there's this megabundle of sensors with no Arduino: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i... :)

Hope that helps.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#54

Post by jacquesm »

replicatorblog wrote: post #2

Ryan, I really like a lot of your posts, but some of them feel a little light for HN. This one could be summarized as "I got an Arduino, Physical products are really cool". Kind of bummed its #1 right now. Nothing personal against you, just that personality rather than content seems to be rocketing things up the page.

Ryan is most gracious in his response, let me be a bit less gracious.

I think his post is on topic and the tech level is actually nicely positioned to get programmers a bit more interested in 'what goes on under the hood'. The vast majority of the people here have never seen, let alone used a soldering iron. Hardware is a big step for software people, the joke goes programmers can't change lightbulbs because it is a hardware problem.

So any post that tries to lower the barrier gets my upvote.

It certainly beats the 'how do you stop sea captains from killing their passengers' that's currently #1 or your own 'analysis of 250 winning designs from threadless.com'.

Keep them coming Ryan, both the technical ones and the 'not so technical' ones.

The best way to offer criticism is to show you can do better.

Just like you're bummed out that this post got a lot of upvotes I'm bummed out that an off-topic comment like this should get more upvotes than anything that directly references the content of the article, you could have sent him an email instead.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#55

Post by follower »

agentultra wrote: post #49

Arduino's are neat, I have one too. One caveat to be aware of is that Processing isn't very portable yet; so it's a bit of a lock-in there. TI has some neat micro-controller kits in the same vein as the Arduino you should google for. Cheap too.

> One caveat to be aware of is that Processing isn't very portable yet; so it's a bit of a lock-in there.

Processing (http://processing.org/) is different to the Arduino although the IDEs are based on the same code base. While the Arduino "language" is related to Wiring (http://wiring.org.co/) it's different too.

By lock-in do you mean lock-in in relation to the language/libraries (which is really a documented subset of C++) or the microcontroller (Atmel based)?

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#56

Post by follower »

cromulent wrote: post #52
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, and this is the thing I worry about the most with my blog. Part of the problem is that a bunch of my readers aren't technical, so I sometimes wonder how deep I should go on technical posts. As far as HN goes, I submit a lot of the stuff I write, but only because a fairly large percentage seems to find some traction here, so I guess people enjoy it. That's not necessarily proof that it's quality content,…

As someone who grew up on Dick Smith's Fun Way Into Electronics kits [1], I love the Arduino. I can see three Arduinos on my desk as I type. I'm not so smart with electronics, but it is a lot of fun, and it's a golden age for this kind of thing. [1] Dick Smith is a successful Aussie entrepreneur who created a chain of hobby electronics stores and sold the chain when it had (I think) 200 employees and he couldn't reme…

You might enjoy this nostalgic look back at the Fun Way kits: http://tronixstuff.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/australian-elect... :)

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#57

Post by replicatorblog »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
replicatorblog wrote: post #2

Ryan, I really like a lot of your posts, but some of them feel a little light for HN. This one could be summarized as "I got an Arduino, Physical products are really cool". Kind of bummed its #1 right now. Nothing personal against you, just that personality rather than content seems to be rocketing things up the page.

Ryan is most gracious in his response, let me be a bit less gracious. I think his post is on topic and the tech level is actually nicely positioned to get programmers a bit more interested in 'what goes on under the hood'. The vast majority of the people here have never seen, let alone used a soldering iron. Hardware is a big step for software people, the joke goes programmers can't change lightbulbs because it is a…

I didn't say it was off topic, I said it was "thin". Ryan (and 40+ others) agreed, hence the edits that make it much more robust.

I agree hardware is important, but yesterday on the front page there was a story about Arduino driven video game controllers. There are regular posts about cool stuff people make with the platform. The word is out. My point was that simply saying Arduino is addicting at this point is kind of like saying "Rails is empowering" its not really "news" anymore. To his credit, Ryan added some interesting content in his edits that make it a much more useful intro for anyone who hasn't yet heard about Arduino.

Re: my Threadless post, it was an original data driven analysis of the customer behavior of a prominent user-generated content startup. You may not care, but it least it was new information presented in a visually compelling way. Heck, Cromulent's comment on this post was more data filled than Ryan's PRE-EDIT post.

Yesterday, you felt the need to publicly encourage people to keep "Offering" things, Today, I'm publicly encouraging the submission of more content rich posts.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#60

Post by jacquesm »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #45
[deleted] wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I felt like I explained that: that was a phenomenon that I noticed , and I'm not even 100% sure that was happening, as I have no way of verifying. I also don't invite my twitter followers to upvote anything; I simply tweet a link to all my blog posts when I post them. I don't tweet links to my posts on HN.

> I don't tweet links to my posts on HN.

I used to until your post :)

Now I wait a couple of hours just to make sure that that's not going to make the difference. I highly doubt people would submit those links anyway, but on the off chance that they would, I'd hate getting people banned or their votes discarded because they appeared like a voting ring.

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