91–100 of 171 posts
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.
I feel ya. Every now and then I have a burst of creativity though and try to pick a project that can be completed in a day =) they're rarer now though (mid 30's)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Broadcom is horrible with datasheets. If you're not apple or intel, an f off should be expected in any request for a datasheet from them.
At work, we briefly considered deploying a fleet of raspberry pis as cheep ARM servers. We ordered an initial batch for evaluation, but then quickly realized just how little technical information Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are willing to make available to their users. They were tight-lipped even with the bare minimums. We ended up abandoning the idea soon after. Unless these companies manage to break aw…
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.
One of the things I found was a tube full of rom-less 8051 microcontrollers and another tube of AM85C30 Dual UARTs I probably picked up at a robotics club swap meet years ago. Ended up building a breadboard "computer" and picked up an universal programmer on eBay for like $50 (uses the open source minipro tool). (https://imgur.com/IjJ6HO6)
Also did some reverse engineering on how to do in-system programming of the BIOS chip in some 386EX based single board computer I have. I wanted to give myself an extra challenge while following the rust blog_os project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dad told me he got a new computer. I asked how long he had the old one. Apparently it was my old team fortress computer. So like 15 years.
My parents are still using the first computer I ever built, which is easily 10 years old! Power consumption on that machine is excessive, and I've been meaning to replace it, but the cost per year in excess electricity hasn't made it worth it to upgrade the machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it depends on if noise and power are your primary considerations. For some, they'd rather not see a useful machine take up space in a landfill, leech toxins into the environment, and simultaneously drive unneeded demand for the production of yet another computer. I guess one would have to do the math and figure out what the environmental impact of a new Pi 3 B+ is. Or they could figure out if the increased el…
For some resources such as copper, it might actually be environmentally net positive to recycle to old copper and buy new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK You can't hook up old ISA or PCI cards to a raspberry pi, and if you can, the x86 drivers and software won't work.
For the record... sure you can!! :D An ISA/IDE cable is just copper ribbon cable using .1" spacing, which is what the GPIO header pin spacing is on a Pi. There is a pin blocked on the standard ide female connector but that pin is just one of many ground connectors on the Pi. Clip it off or dremel/drill out the hole as needed. Jeez, now I just convinced myself that I MIGHT use the cable some day. Thanks a lot! >:/ Was…
I have all sorts of ISA cards that have no alternative (other than for huge expense) or software. Quite a few IEEE-488, many other weird interfaces, DSP dev boards, one of a kind/prototype boards, other stuff. I have boxes of the stuff, and know hundreds of people who have the same needs. We have mailing lists.
No, a PI can't do that. No it can't emulate that. No it's not as generally useful as you think unless all you care about is stuff written in the last 5 years.
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.
When I was 20, I got into a relationship with someone who was critical of it, and I ended up succumbing to their criticism, quitting my hacking, and going into IT industry instead.
I did that for about 15 years, but all along, I missed doing this kind of stuff. I kept doing it a little here and there, but my jobs would eat most of my hack juice, and I just didn't have much left for my own projects.
But I had already tasted the sweet nectar, and eventually I got tired of waiting for it, and abandoned the professional world gradually but completely.
I'm back to hacking now, and I could not be happier.
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? What "real" hardware would actually have any use for it today? I understand that it might be fun, but I don't see the practical use case for it.
The 737 Max? It uses an 80286, so it’s even older. I'm also curious what use it would have. I imagine in cases where you're tied to such old hardware, you would also be tied to old software.
Exactly. If you have to support some old esoteric hardware, you probably wouldn't be able to run a recent kernel anyways, since all your software would probably also be tied/constrained to whaterver it was developed and tested for.