171–180 of 415 posts
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I think it's very considerate to not add lead to a business card people may put in their pockets.
Lead is restricted because of what happens to it when PCBs are landfilled, not because it is harmful to touch.
To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.
My first PC had 66/33 MHz 80486 processor and 8 MB ram, 320 MB HDD. You could run AutoCAD, play Doom, Civilization, have dual boot for Linux, Windows 3.11 etc. It could compile Linux from source.
To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.
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I mainly work in web-dev, but working in embedded systems is kind of my hobby. It's kind of refreshing working on bare-metal, optimizing up-to single bytes of data, when I'm usually working on layers and layers of abstraction everyday.
Where does a web-dev turn to to get started in this as a hobby?
At the moment, I'm doing a structured C book course (C: A Modern Approach), and I've also signed up for the edX course "Embedded Systems - Shape The World: Microcontroller Input/Output"
It uses the TM4C123 board, which from a look around seemed to be a decent enough board for a beginner. I'd seen complaints of Arduino, but I'm not experienced enough to know the validity of their claims.
Either way, I'm having fun. Not sure if I'd switch career as Web Dev is full of decent paying jobs but it's nice to have a hobby that's different from the day job.
Maybe I'm twisted but my first thought if that if I were a pen tester I would want business cards exactly like this. And yes, they would run Linux... and some other things. :-)
Ha someone on Reddit suggested this. See the thing is, they have my contact info printed on them, so I'm really easy for the police to find after everything is hacked!
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Where does a web-dev turn to to get started in this as a hobby?
Start with an Arduino and the Adafruit tutorials. Very gentle learning curve. https://learn.adafruit.com/category/learn-arduino From there, can decide where your interests might be. To continue with Arduino hardware but without the IDE, I'd recommend _AVR Programming_ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/make-avr-programming/97... For other low level programming, Atmel's AVR Studio and their dev boards are incredible…
Somewhat related, I've also used buildroot in both AWS and GCP to run workloads from read-only system images. Quite liberating in my opinion. No ssh, no ansible, etc. Build the image, launch it and off it goes. GCE even allows you to use the same boot disk, if mounted read-only, for multiple instances, perfect for these type of images.
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I don't see why you were downvoted. I fully get why the blog writer didn't include USB-C with this awesome project. But there's now a growing group of people who simply can't use USB-A anymore with their laptops. Most will have an adapter, but not all.
What an absurd tragedy. Everyone was just fine with usb-A and ethernet ports and hdmi but no, now these laptops need dongles for literally everything.
This is cool as it showcases his embedded engineering prowess. Years of startup meets[1] have left a bad taste in mouth for the business cards. I've seen people exchange business cards ceremoniously, only to give a missed call to each other immediately. Business cards are a waste of money, paper and I don't want to get started on the plastics. I honestly thought that proliferation of NFC in smartphones would help to…
I find that business cards are still helpful to get the spelling of people's names right - otherwise you have to either hand your phone over to the other person and have them type their name into your phone, or at least have them text you the spelling, which can be awkward to ask for and anyway has more friction than accepting a business card. Also, sharing WhatsApp contacts makes me uncomfortable. There's various fi…