131–140 of 276 posts
When I want to record for real, I'm going to use my DAW. But I want a way to quickly record tracks and this looks pretty great.
Another complication is that at least in theory, if you're selling electronics, there are actual regulations and third-party testing that needs to happen, and if you fail emissions, you might have to redo your design from scratch. Imagine we had that for software - "your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB".
So, I'm happy for the author, but I think he had an outlier experience. When you look at Kickstarter stories, people repeatedly stumble over this. Manufacturing / cost difficulties, supplier issues, reliability issues, etc.
Would love to hear more on that but I suppose the omission is not an accident.
Just that hardware equivalent of 200K of lines of code would take far, far more time and resources and with way longer debug cycle, especially when you hit the complexity point where bodging few wires to fix the prototype gets harder and harder.
That's what people mean when they say hardware is hard - if you need to start iterating on a board and not just board's software it gets complex and expensive really quick
But it is far better than it was before - I got my 5 board prototype of similar complexity (also esp32 based) within a week, assembled board, for like $100 (and it was my design mistakes that made it so expensive, like picking screw connectors in places that could totally use far cheaper generic part JLCPCB had in stock, i just didn't know any better), just a decade ago that would probably be order of magnitude more expensive.
So yeah, for those that always wanted to build a hardware project, it's probably best time in the history to do that. Both PCBA and mechanical part got cheap and commoditized enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I reject the idea that programming is „just typing“, so we are very unlikely to understand each others. Writing the code and thinking about the exact logic you want to apply and all its implications are part of the same problem solving process in my mind. You can for sure plan things at a different layer of abstraction but putting things together in code is a very satisfying and IMHO is the actual building part of th…
> I reject the idea that programming is „just typing“, so we are very unlikely to understand each others. I'm sorry if I gave the impression I think programming is just typing. For me "programming" is the whole activity of creating software with code, you can do programming without the literal action of typing. > Writing the code and thinking about the exact logic you want to apply and all its implications are part o…
Maybe they just like doing it the old fashioned way. You can both exist.
Unless you’re getting a commission to sell LLMs to people I struggle to understand what you’re trying to achieve.
Wow, congrats, I remember reading your HN post. I hope you will continue writing blog posts on your journey, I expect quite a lot of software engineers would be very interested going though a similar journey now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming. It’s neat to work on something physical for a change
> now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming Never understood this, was the "most of the fun of programming" the literal typing for you? For me it was about solving problems and building things, and I get to do that more now than before, and without all the literal typing.
The problem at least I have is... when something goes wrong, often enough even you as the original author / LLM slave-driver have no idea what is going on where, and completely forget trying to dig into someone else's pile of vibe-coded garbage. For every single problem you now are completely beholden to the AI agent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes the anti-counterfeit is primarily app enforced (though entirely offline). I do use the firmware encryption features of the ESP32-S3, whatever that is worth, and the firmware is tied to the HSM.
What happens when app is outdated and can't be installed to current android os?
If there are no more app updates, presumably there are no more firmware updates either, so the flashing part probably doesn’t matter (and you can probably flash the last published image to an authentic device by other ESP32-y means if you really need to).
As to the day-to-day: Pretty sure the hardware still records regular ol’ MIDI files to the SD card. The app seems incredibly well-thought-out and ergonomic but, at the end of the day, nonessential to the device’s core function.
Somebody could presumably build and sell their own “MIDI Recorder Loop Nonstop Device Digital Piano Upgraded New 100%,” but it wouldn't be a Jamcorder, you couldn’t flash Jamcorder firmware updates to it just by slapping an ESP32 in a case, and the official Jamcorder companion app would not talk to it. Which… fair enough, right?
For that matter it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody could write their own client for the real Jamcorder, if they felt so inclined… but with the official stack so absolutely perfect from a design perspective, why would they?
Wow, congrats, I remember reading your HN post. I hope you will continue writing blog posts on your journey, I expect quite a lot of software engineers would be very interested going though a similar journey now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming. It’s neat to work on something physical for a change
> now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming Never understood this, was the "most of the fun of programming" the literal typing for you? For me it was about solving problems and building things, and I get to do that more now than before, and without all the literal typing.
Some people fall to that temptation instead of using LLM to just do the menial stuff and do the fun stuff themselves.
Hardware isn’t hard if the hardware is easy? There’s very few components, one of which is a pre made module, and it took 3 years to make essentially a text logger.
I can't wait for ASIC manufacturing to become as easy as ordering a PCB.