Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
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Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
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Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#2Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home?
Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming!
You too can spend weeks optimising your opcodes to squeeze them into mere bytes of memory! You'll need the rest of the 8kb available for lookup tables, because your processor is only running at 8mhz!
You too can dream of a 'debugger' as you write and decode your own LED blink sequences!
You too can draw your graphics by timing your own NTSC scanlines!
You too can almost burn your house down using a soldering iron while sleep deprived!
You too can almost lose your mind when you find out that the reason your program isn't working is because your resistors have heated up by one degree since you wrote the code!
It's fun, the tooling to write the code can be as modern as you like, and the community is great.
It isn't as hard as it can be made to sound, precisely because the constraints quickly force you to think small. When you're only trying to make a device for automatically traumatising your cat, the constraints only pose as much of a problem as the much looser constraints you might encounter solving a larger problem with more powerful tools, say, running a website. So the learning curve isn't that steep if you're already a programmer.
http://electronics.stackexchange.com
And if that's still too sissy for you then just build stuff entirely in 555 timers: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/24/555-video-game/
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#3Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home? Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming! You too can spend weeks optimising your opcod…
this greybeard is looking forward to going retro videogame mad with gameduino.
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#4Ah, memories. (Though I assiduously keep my beard off the lower reaches of my neck.)
I did start programming back in the days of punched cards/early timesharing on IBM mainframes (late 70's), but my first microprocessor experience was at a laser-printer start-up (TeX project spinoff from Stanford, Imagen), so we had the luxury of using the Sun-1 boards (the boards that Andy Bechtolsteim designed for use at Stanford, and which were the basis of the first Sun Micro workstations, the first Cisco routers, and the first Imagen image processors).
The Sun-1 boards had 68000 processors (no VM) with dual UART chip, so we actually could attach a terminal and interact with our primitive software that way (both for download & debugging). I had to write a real-time OS from scratch in our case, since we didn't couldn't really use the huge galumphing BSD Unix port that Sun was producing for future release.
Memories...
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#5Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home? Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming! You too can spend weeks optimising your opcod…
this greybeard is looking forward to going retro videogame mad with gameduino. http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/
Me too. I see he has done well with his kickstarter project.
What on earth is he going to do with >$26,000? It doesn't cost that much to produce and ship the promised goodies to the backers, and it's not like he's going to need to spend a lot on marketing the thing. I guess he could just pay his living expenses for a bit while he works on it.
What's the general etiquette/precedent on kickstarter when someone receives backing vastly in excess of their goal? Is it acceptable to just plough the cash into whatever you want?
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#6Anybody else think its weird his posts are continually on the homepage?
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#7Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home? Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming! You too can spend weeks optimising your opcod…
Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays!
I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#8Anybody else think its weird his posts are continually on the homepage?
Not at all, given that he was an active member and prolific member of HN and now that he has taken a break from HN he has all this free time to just write.
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#9Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home? Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming! You too can spend weeks optimising your opcod…
Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays! I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.
>4 bits to your byte
Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?
Re: Those Gray Beard Hackers And Their Tall Stories
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bah humbug! Now I feel like a greybeard - all this arduino stuff is spoiling you. Some of the microcontrollers I used to use only gave you 4 bits to your byte, try telling that to youngsters nowadays! I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.
>4 bits to your byte Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte#History
Time was, a byte could be anywhere from 4 to 12 bits, depending on the architecture. A "nybble" is half a "byte".