Slashdot Mirror

I started with bare bones AVR. I switched to Arduino. I could see from online community support Arduino would jump start my experience. A year or so later I have made several higher ended projects including the electronic payload for a near space balloon. I would have not achieved so much so quickly without Arduino and the community support. One can still go small with Arduino (Nano, Micro, etc) and one can go barebones as well: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone. I generally prototype with the Uno and switch to the Nano or barebones when moving beyond the prototype stage.

This seems like overkill. If you just want a web interface, there is an Arduino library that will allow you to establish a SLIP connection over USB to connect to the Arduino via a webbrowser, no ethernet shield required: SerialIP. It does take up a bit of memory, though, which leads to the next suggestion...

How did you max out the program memory on your Arduino? Why on earth would you use 16 bits (0.001953125 dC precision) to store temperatures, when your thermometer only has +/-0.5 dC resolution? Does it really matter that you turn on your refrigerator compressor at the exact nanosecond it needs to come on?

LEDs will still have a pretty broad spectral response so you'd have overlap, ...

It's all about reversing the polarity (yay, it's true and I'm pandering to /.). Charging the parasitic capacitance of an LED and measuring discharge in the presence of its peak wavelength does not yield a broad spectral response, at all. I had problems in the past when I tried using LEDs as simple photodetectors; they weren't sensitive throughout the spectrum. The ambient lighting caused measurement errors with fluorescent vs. daylight/incandescent. The green and yellow LEDs failed to detect light at one foot away from a fluorescent bulb, but blue worked better, and red worked best (I don't remember the wavelengths of all the LEDs, but the red was 640nm, and blue was 470nm). The blue and red corresponded to the emission spectrum of the CFL bulbs tried, which *mostly why they detected light (*they also had some advantage in capacitance).

...and need quite a bit of gain.

It's a time measurement, there's no gain. With just an Arduino, it's easy to build this type of circuit. Others already have. It uses a resistor to control the RC time constant; increasing the duration to something measurable in microseconds - not amplitude.

Try one of the taos colour sensing chips

Not if I can help it. Mainly because LEDs are cheaper. And a proprietary component for the sake of simplicity makes me die a little inside. It's funny how simplicity often turns out to include a hidden catch-22 or conveniently undocumented feature.

The proper way to handle realtime hardware interfacing in *nix is with a dedicated microcontroller that isn't affected by kernel scheduling (which isn't realtime).

Therefore just spend $10 on a microcontroller board of your choosing and link it to the Nexus through USB or Bluetooth or Wifi or NFC. Let the microcontroller handle the hardware interfacing without latency, while Linux handles high level issues. Best of both worlds.

The lack of GPIO pins on a Nexus is pretty much an asset, as it keeps you from doing the wrong thing. And Android even has an SDK for exactly this situation, the ADK -- Accessory Development Kit. This is typically used with something like the Arduino ADK, but there are tons of equivalent but much cheaper boards available for the same purpose.

I have an original Motorola Droid sitting in a drawer I'm thinking of re purposing into a smart thermostat. It's going to need a helper and the Pi is way overkill for that. I'll probibly use an Aduino, which is still way overkill, or roll my own interface with a U421 and let the droid do all the processing if I can get them talking to each other.

Am I supposed to be impressed or something?

Interested, perhaps.

Android has some serious tools to help with robotics and autonomous vehicles, and being open source, it's nice to learn on, and free.

Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK)

http://developer.android.com/tools/adk/index.html

Arduino SDK board

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardADK

There's been a huge surge in robotics projects as a result.

I kinda agree with what you say ... but many shields are also available as breakout boards so you can just throw a couple of wires across from your perfboard arduino. You can even remove the headers from the shield and use that. (I'm sure you're aware of all this...maybe even done it)

What I really came here to say is that the 2012 Arduinos have full USB built in and are even cheaper than the old ones were. You can even get them without headers, saving a couple more bucks (and maybe some de-soldering if want to connect wires directly to them).

http://store.arduino.cc/eu/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11_12&products_id=225

http://arduino.cc/playground/SmartGPU/SmartGPU

Arduino

Lazy bastards.

One thing that almost all of the suggestions to date (with the exception of Lego) is that they don't show how programming can affect the real world. Arduino projects, OTOH, will give him the opportunity to get immediate feedback. Arduino kits are used successfully by many teachers and camp counselors at the elementary and junior high levels. The base kits are cheap, the programming language is simple, easy to graps, yet powerful enough to get the kits to do an amazing amount of stuff.

I think the most important thing at your son's age is for him to be able to write a small fragment of code & see its effect. Something as basic and accessible as an Arduino is perfect for this type of experimentation. To link you to a few resources, the main arduino site is http://arduino.cc./ You can find examples of some of the cool add-ons at http://sparkfun.com/

You might even have some fun with one of these things yourself!

The Arduino Uno does have a CE mark. Look at the picture of the back of the board.

I don't know it is required, but it does have it

>.> Reading comprehension fail?

Honeywell's thermostat is parasitically powered, not their sensors. I'm saying the general technique - drawing power from other devices over e.g. data lines - is obvious to anyone skilled in the art of circuitry.

Here's a Maxim DS18S20 1-wire parasite-powered digital thermometer chip. http://www.maxim-ic.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/2815

Arduino parasitic power. http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/OneWire

Hell. RFID chips derives power parasitically from the transmitter.

Good question, so I went looking. Seems the thing nowadays are Arduino boards, of which there are many to choose from.

For old timers like me, we may want to pick up a good ol' KIM-1 board

Nasa has a list of plants that actually clean the air. A PDF of the original study is here, or you can go to a simplified list on Wikipedia. I think we are all aware of "sasquatches", individuals who while technically gifted are hygienically challenged. Having been 'squatched (trapped in an enclosed area by a sasquatch with precious little fresh air rejuvenation) far too many times, I also offer up a list of scented plants that can help. Humans tend to respond most favorably to rose-scented flowers (hence the popularity of roses). Sickly-sweet perfumes (such as lilies) can be unpleasant to some people. Miniature roses and rose-scented geraniums are probably the easiest to care for. Avoid poisonous plants (e.g. Angel trumpet) as at some point, a teenager (with little or no impulse control) is going to think it's funny (or for revenge) to slip a few bits of the plant into someone's drink or food without giving much thought to the potential outcome. If your high school has a gardening club, it would be wise to involve them. This could be a good lesson plan for students interested in biology and interior design.

Remove all fluorescent light tubes and replace them with LED banks. Preferably full spectrum or with a blend of colors. Make sure the lighting is always indirect and that the source points (the LEDs themselves) are not directly viewable. This makes for good, soft all-around lighting with little or no glare. Very easy on the eyes. Fluorescent lighting is very harsh on the eyes. I would build the banks based on five LEDs: cool white, warm white, red, green, and blue. I would also sprinkle in a couple of black-light purple LEDs. Turn this into a lesson and have the kids build such banks with an Arduino to control them. The kids could learn to program various light levels and colors to simulate various natural lighting situations. You could program the LED banks along the walls to actually change the color of the room. Also, full-spectrum lighting is good for the plants, just as it is calming for the humans in the room.

The room design is important as well. I would have the walls painted white with a slight bluish or cool grayish tint to it. Neutral grey colors are best for rooms where computer graphic design or image processing are taking place, to avoid the eyes being fooled about the color balance of an image. While greys are a cold and sterile color, the room can be warmed up by adjusting the color balance of the LED lights mentioned above. One wall should have a 16:9 rectangle painted in reflective paint to be used as a screen or have a retractable screen in front of an optional chalkboard for lessons. In a computer class, the teacher can then show code samples on the screen and demonstrations of changes to the code. Outgoing vents should be placed along the chalkboard or whiteboard, so dust from chalk and fumes and dust from the markers exits the room via the vents to protect the computers from dust. Good ventilation is also important due to the incidence of 'squatches mentioned above.

Chairs should have gel padding in the seats. There should be footrests beneath the desks. Being comfortable is vital when coding. Cheap, hard, plastic seats become uncomfortable very quickly and that becomes distracting while trying to work out some code.

For equipment, I would suggest Unix-based computers with a centralized administration console. Students should only have non-administrative accounts on their computers. Windows could be run via WINE or Parallels or Fusion, depending on the parent OS of the computers. Virtualized environments can easily be cleansed should a student introduce or create malicious software. Students should be encouraged to try and figure out how to escalate their permi

So they're not robots, but if the girls are into fashion it's a a great way to get them started on programming while still keeping their interests in mind, They can make funky pillows for their bedroom or keep out signs for their doors or I dunno something else that a 12 year old girl might actually want. http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad

Or Simulink & an XPC.
Hell with an XPC box and a few dozen knobs we built an entire engine hardware in the loop simulator. Knobs for air pressure, engine speed, throttle position, etc. Took one of our technicians about 3-4 days to get all built up.

Or if you're poor an arduino and some Pots. That's all "Knobs" and "sliders" are. Go read up on voltage dividers. Get yourself a A/D converter. Feed one side 5V, Set 0V to 0%, 5V to 100%. Tada read it with the Arduino and you have yourself actual inputs.

Here's one already done with an Arduino. The more pots you want find something with more analog IO.

Buy a project box from from radio shack drill some holes, put it all in. You could probably do most of it for under $50.

Here's an example of a web server that let's you see the voltage on the analog input pins:

http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/WebServer

This is pretty much a tracking problem, I would use the open source Predator Tracking algorithm to track each of the car simultaneously. The problem I see is if it is going to be fast enough for 100 cars, but it is worth to investigate it. http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/ Alternatively, thinking about using open source-hardware as a solution, use the open source Arduino Micro-controller Piece the sensor you need, and you will have your system at a much lower price ! http://www.arduino.cc/

A smart heat pump thermostat would probably need external sensors for the outdoor temperature, and maybe even add things like wind speed, ambient heat from direct sunlight vs overcast, etc to determine when to start up the heat pump and stay only in the most efficient heat pump mode yet still get to the desired temperature at the desired time

Sounds like you need the equivalent of a boiler reset control (PDF). It has a sensor for measuring outdoor temperature, and a sensor that measures the boiler exit temperature. Based on a setting or two from you during setup, it will cycle the boiler on and off to keep the boiler exit temperature within X degrees of a setpoint temperature (whenever there's a call for heat from a thermostat, that is). That setpoint temperature varies inversely with outdoor temperature: when it is 50 F outside, the boiler exit temperature setpoint may be 120 F; when the temperature drops to 0 F, the exit temperature setpoint will increase to 170 F.

The software running this algorithm probably amounts to about 50-100 lines of code. Using something like an Arduino, you could write the rest of the software using their standard libraries in about another 300-500 lines of code. You could program the heat profile pretty easily over the plain-text serial terminal (available to your computer over USB). The hardware interface to the heat pump could be done for a slap-dash $50, or more properly for $100-$200.

If it really bugs you that much, why not just have a go and fix it?

If you are looking for a small mobo with Linux perhaps your best choice woud be the Beagle board.

For lower capabilities, Arduino would be the obvious choice, it's programmed in C, using gcc.

I don't see too much in this Jumentum, offering a web server in a chip is interesting, but this capability has been available in small chipsets (not single chips) for Atmel or Microchip PICs for years. If I needed that capability right now I'd probably go for an Arduino with ethernet.

Apart from this, Jumentum is a poor name choice, "jumento" means donkey in Portuguese.

Incorrect, and a reminder that Hanlon's razor is not just a nice quote:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

The pin spacing was an innocent error, not some Machiavellian scheme to ensure the profitability of shields:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1212632541 (post 13)

The Arduino guys have pretty much thrown open their doors to the world and said, "here's everything we do and how to build it yourself". Why do you see negative when this sentiment is overtly positive?

After we're done slashdotting arduino.cc, go take a look around. Arduino makes an open hardware and software design for an 8-bit microcontroller board with a bunch of pins for analog and digital input and output, with a friendly C-based integrated development environment. Even if you're an artist and not an electronics engineer, it's a friendly easy-learning-curve environment for building electronics that respond to sensors, and taking technology that used to be opaque magic and turn it into transparent crafts you can understand.

Typical kinds of things people do with Arduinos are blink LEDs, use all sorts of input sensors for distance or temperature to control blinking LEDs, move servos or other motors, build simple robots, sew them into clothing so you can blink LEDs in time to music or when you wave your arms, turn on your lawn sprinklers when your plants are dry, that kind of stuff.

What this new release does is two main things - there's one new 8-bit board that's simpler, cheaper, and a bit more powerful, and there's another new board that has a 32-bit CPU and a lot more sensor I/O. The 8-bit designs are a somewhat limited programming environment (which is enough for a lot of things, and can be an intellectual puzzle if you like that sort of thing). The 32-bit design will let you do much more powerful projects, which may be especially useful for music or video, and it's still cheap and friendly.

You're right!
I just got an arduino from Sparkfun delivered today.

I'm old enough to remember Heathkit kits. They always had a good reputation for quality, but I remember them as being too expensive for me to afford. The Arduino is very affordable and I've found some excellent tutorials about it on YouTube.

Maybe Heathkit could package some arduino-based kits and not only help gain the interest of a new generation of tinkerers, but also bring back those who got left out when surface-mount parts pushed the DIP package into obscurity.

"During the talk Eben explains that the $25 price point was decided upon because it is the cost of a textbook so it made sense. Students buy textbooks, so a PC priced the same is a natural fit and hopefully an easy purchase for them, their parents, or their school." [emphasis added]

Students also buy milk but it doesn't mean that therefore computers should cost the same as milk. I don't think that a real computer should be worth the same as one textbook because of the fact that many more than one textbook could be downloaded on it and thus much more money could be saved by children if that is really a fully functional general purpose computer that the story makes us believe it is. It is worth noting that unlike the $100 laptops, this computer is not complete. It doesn't have a keyboard, it doesn't have a display. It has a HDMI port - yes, that will help poor children who can't afford a computer more expensive than $25. Also, are they going to carry a plasma TV around to use it? Quite frankly I think that it would be a much better idea to offer a Fuzebox kit from Adafruit - a do-it-yourself retro video console kit with open source software and open source hardware - or even an Arduino kit with TV output. In this case however all we have seen so far is a promise to deliver a $25 embedded board which is nice but it can hardly be called a computer, and especially not a computer that poor children in developing countries would need the most. We don't even know how much RAM will it have, whether it will run Linux or even if it will be useful for anything more serious than hacking a simple embedded Linux project. Don't get me wrong, I think that embedded projects are a great way for children to learn how computers work. But this is not a substitute for a laptop, notebook or netbook that those children need. Even a tablet would be a better idea but we all know this is not going to happen because apparently taking a keyboard out of a netbook makes it somehow ten times more expensive. We need a cheap laptop, a fully functional, self contained computer that children can use instead of textbooks, not as just one of them.

... for the Arduino crowd. Now your Lilypad will be able to tell you whether you're pregnant or not.

You're confusing Arduino with AVR. AVR is the actual microcontroller and they sell in much larger numbers. Arduino is a development platform in which the AVR fits.In other words, Arduino is a subset of the total AVR market, which in turn is a subset of the total microcontroller market.

Arduino is targeting the hobbyist who would rather write three lines of C code rather than fifty lines of assembly. They are two entirely different groups; though clearly there is some overlap.

For the Arduino group, you go here.
For more general purpose AVR use, including some Arduino use, go here.

I see something like this as much less of a "game console", and much more of a device I'd glue to my alarm system, and to my sprinkler system, and to my thermostat, and to my garage door opener, etc..etc...etc...

Try this: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardEthernet

I got mine hooked up to the home router and I can control the stuff connected to it via my mobile phone's web browser (from anywhere on Earth!)

You're thinking Arduino. If performance is a concern you can try the Arduino-compatible ChipKIT 32 from Digilent, which is an Arduino-compatible device using a more powerful PIC microcontroller.

Uzebox is cool!

While on the subject, I'd also like to point out some other projects I've found interesting:

OpenPandora, a community-designed, Linux-running handheld. The specs are pretty impressive, by today's standards, but were even more impressive when it was first introduced. Best thing is, they're now manufacturing and shipping!

For those who like to tinker themselves, there is the BeagleBoard, a cheap (as they come) single board computer with impressive specs, designed for open source software. The Wikipedia article lists a number of alternatives, some of which may be more powerful and/or cheaper.

One interesting alternative to the BeagleBoard is the Hawkboard, which is backed by its own community. It's slightly less powerful than the BeagleBoard, but, at 89 USD, also costs quite a bit less.

And then there's the ever-popular Arduino, which comes in several varieties. You can buy them assembled starting at about 20 USD, or build your own for under 10 USD. They can be extended with "shields", e.g. to get extra I/O capabilities. Pretty cool stuff!

Personally, I am still tinkering around with resistors and transistors and the like, designing and simulating circuits with Qucs (which I feel is a lot more production-ready than that website suggests) and my Nokia N900, but any of the above hardware looks like it might be a nice next step up.

The article is about creating a Keyboard HID device with a Teensy USB development board, but the same can be done with the official Arduino development boards. The Arduino UNO and Mega2560 boards come with an atmega8u2 handling the USB to serial interface. The nice thing about this is that the atmega8u2 can be reprogrammed to turn the Arduino into a USB device, like a Keyboard HID, mouse HID, or MIDI device.

Details here: http://arduino.cc/playground/Main/InterfacingWithHardware#USB

http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://makezine.com/ http://www.instructables.com/ http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ And many many more, but those are my favorites.

Arduino is a great starting point for micro controllers. You can put in raw AVR C++ code into the ide if you want. Personally, Arduino helped me get going quickly. Then if you outgrow it, you can use the same hardware and program without the IDE and all the libraries if you want. From there, it is easy to move to other ATMega/ATTiny chips if you need to.

Arduino is more than make an LED blink. There are libraries for LCDs, Ethernet, read/write SD Cards, and examples for many sensors. (and much much more)

Even in Arduino's bitmath page: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/BitMath They show you the low level AVR C if you want to use it.

I am not a programmer, but with the available libraries, I was able to accomplish many projects quickly. In less than a year of using arduino in spare time, I learned enough to move on to other AVR micros. GCC supports AVR micros. The TI Launchpad is highly restricted to windows.

No comment on PIC. Have not had time to try programming with PIC.

The Arduino language is C with a bunch of libraries. In fact, it uses avr-gcc, and you can program it outside their IDE.

Arduinos can be used so many different ways... here're a few things you can do with them:

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/category/arduino

http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield I

Well, look at it this way. An arduino is a complete circuit with a couple of digital and analog inputs and outputs that you can control. People love to drive LEDS with them for example and it's very easy. For example, to drive a led all you need is a resistor and the led. You connect the resistor to an output pin of your choice and attach the led to the resistor. The negative side of the led goes into the groundpin on the arduino. If you want that led to blink this would be you code: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/BlinkingLED With another ledpin though, because pin13 happens to be the build in led on the Arduino. As you can see it's just C. So you have a complete environment that makes it very easy to connect hardware like sensors and you have this very easy and readable programming language. That makes for very easy and rapid developing. This doesn't dominate the pic and microworld by a long shot. It's far to expensive for mass production of projects. But it does dominate the hobby world. And people make really cool things with them. From laserharps to autohovering quadrocopters. And ledcubes. Lots of led-cubes lol. Look at youtube for it when you have some time to burn.

(a listing can be found at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware )

I have tried to use Arduino boards in the past, and while they're really cool for hobbyist stuff, they are very hard to integrate into battery-operated things:

1. The operating voltage is 5V (some may be 3.3V, I forget) and draw a lot of current. Batteries that supply this kind of voltage are HUGE. It would be really nice if they had a design that was optimized for low voltages and low currents, like for mobile sensing, so that I could use coin cells.

2. The devices are really memory-limited. The Uno, which is probably the most popular, has something like 2kB of ram. I used the board to interface with some sensors for tracking a flight trajectory on-board, and I could only record a few seconds of data before running out of room. Wireless transmission wasn't really an option because of power (= more batteries) limitations.

3. Connecting to USB resets the board, wiping the memory, unless you cut a trace on the board. This is supposed to help facilitate loading new programs, but becomes an annoyance if you wanted to use it to transfer sensor data stored on-board to a computer. When you cut the trace to disable the autoreset, it becomes difficult to time the reset button manually so that your program uploads.

Overall, as an EE, I was very impressed at how easy it was to use, but I think the issues I mentioned warrant some fixing if Arduino is going to be used for things like sensing.

Arduino is the project, Uno is the board. There's actually a few other boards they've created: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware

If you like them you may also want to checkout many of the other microcontrollers in a Digikey or Mouser catalog. I collect them myself. Everything from PIC to Atmel-based, to Zigbee. They're all quite fun.

The main advantage of the Arduino is it's open source design. The other controllers are not as customizable _before_ production. With arduino you can add things if you need them on board.

Nothing is more open than a x86 pc platform.

Found one, do I get a cookie?

I enjoyed it. Imagine how nice it would be in a instant wireless browsing device. Or it serves out pages from which you can control a connected Arduino device. Turn on and go - very neat!

The main problem with the OLPC, the one thing that made the project open to subversion by companies like Intel and Microsoft, is its centralized model of development. You get the laptops or tablets from one source, say, the central government of the country that buys into the idea or some buy-one/donate-the-other scheme. I understand that it's supposed to be more of an educational than a computing project. But this set-up generates dependency. What happens when the machines are damaged? More importantly, what happens to the next batch of children without laptops? Since the machines are manufactured in the usual Asian places (hint: two countries claiming the same name), this will likely result in a foreign exchange outflow from a country that can least afford it, as certain essential non-technological items (e.g. food and basic medicine) may need to take priority.

What the OLPC should have set out to develop is a RepRap-like infrastructure that will allow the adults (or even older children) of the community that takes part in the project to manufacture the laptops by themselves from cheap, readily available components. If this isn't 100% possible, then give them at least enough transfer of technology to allow them to build the least technological parts, like the case or the keyboard. Think of a laptop case made out of recycled plastic or hard laminated cardboard. Then again, how far off is the day when we can run a desktop OS on an Arduino board?

Don't just give them fish. Teach them how to fish.

Computers made using such technology might appear crude at first, but not much cruder than the devices that ushered in the PC revolution.

From http://arduino.cc/blog/2010/09/24/dinner-is-ready/

more advanced users will be able to reprogram the USB chip to make the board show up as a variety of USB devices (Keyboards, Mice, Joysticks, MIDI etc)

How bout a PS3 controller?

How about the XKCD Pet Netbook Robot? :) It's finally been turned into a reality using a One Laptop Per Child XO-1 + and an Arduino microcontroller via Project Butia!

If you're really trying to go off the ranch and do something cheap, tiny, and simple I gotta tell you Arduino boards are by far the most versatile and cost effective solution I've found. There are libraries for simple web servers and all kinds of stuff.

Downside is may have to wire up your own hardware and you're not writing anything terribly complex with the limited CPU and lack of real OS support. But honestly if I need that kind of oomph for Linux on a network project I'd buy a WRT54G or something and use that. Hardware is loads cheaper and probably 10x more reliable.

He uses the Arduino circuit board, an open-source programmable electronics platform. It's how your code can interact IRL! I've been thinking about getting one myself, that's how you step from software hacking to hardware hacking :) http://www.arduino.cc/

Or http://wiki.opengraphics.org/ or http://www.arduino.cc/

It is time we start the Free Hardware Foundation (FHF).

You can build a reader/writer with an arduino: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1206874649/8

I think even in 100 years it will be possible to get the data off it. The file format will be a bigger issue, in my mind.

Websites like http://www.tomshardware.com/ are interesting, but they are more interested in computers like PCs etc..

I think there is another way to look at this question of "figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way"

From the moment I saw this, i.e. "hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware" ... that sounds more like open hardware/software projects like Arduino. e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
http://www.arduino.cc/

Also "banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way" ... thats just like these smaller embedded CPU open hardware/software projects. These small embedded CPU projects are progressing just like the early 1980s computer era and once again the growth is driven by hobbyists. They are creating more advanced projects all the time. For example here's a 2D and 3D software rendering engine running on a small cheap embedded ARM processor where its even generating the video signal in software.
http://hackaday.com/2010/06/13/gaming-system-for-less-than-three-bucks/

Then moving up in scale even bigger, hobbyists have even created a remarkable games console called Pandora. Incredibly this is more powerful than any *mobile* console by Nintendo or Sony! (apparently its taken the hobbyists two years to design their Pandora hand held console. I think its very inspring work, but then its what hobbyists were doing in the early 1980s computer era when they were building their own high spec computers, to then sell to other hobbyists who were more interested in doing interesting things with the software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)

The hobbyists driven growth in open hardware/software projects I think is very much like the early 1980s computer era with the same kinds of interests for hobbyists.

http://www.arduino.cc/