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There are a lot of microcontroller/hardware programming contests.

It is programming on a small scale, but it also involves building some hardware. If you are burnt out on programming, working with your hands on real hardware is a great way to relax. It is also fun to work on the nitty gritty low level stuff if you are used to high-level languages. (or vice versa). When it comes to languages it is Haskell or Assembly for me, anything in between would just be mediocre :)

There are a lot of PIC, Amtel, or other microcontroller contests out there.

http://www.circuitcellar.com/ hosts regular contests with big cash prizes
http://piclist.com/techref/piclist/pcbcontest.htm is a monthly PIC one.

anyone have any other good ones?

Ebay is your friend.

Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.

A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.

And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.

Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.

If you can handle the volume, get on the piclist. The variety of stuff you will see covered is huge.

Good links.

If you're just looking to work with a small microprocessor/computer to get that nostalgic feel, just take a modern microcontroller and start breadboarding.

Microcontroller products from Microchip and Atmel fit the bill nicely.

For support and help with Microchip PIC microcontroller development, you can hardly go wrong with the MIT-PICList, and for Atmel AVR micros AVRFreaks is the place to go.

Then you'll probably find yourself over at DigiKey buying parts for your projects after you have gained some insight into just how cool it is to have a 40 MHz processor with 2K or more of FLASH RAM on-board in a 18-pin device right at your fingertips that only needs a PC and some imagination to program to act like just about any logic device.

Have fun twiddling those bits, boys and girls.

OK, where to begin?

above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general

This is slashdot. I bet 90% of people here cana program.

Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.


No. Just like an other language, assebmler had libries/routines that people have given you. Check out The Piclist

And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.

Get a P16PRO40. Or Build Your Own

There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.



The piclist has all of this.

well, not really. How do you plan to have a variable square wave output just by using flip-flops? You'd need a high speed master clock (TTL can style), flipflops, a divide-by-n chip, etc. You'd end up with a huge chip count. Using an SX style microcontrollers would be much easier.

Making a varible frew sine wave generator, now there's a worthy hack.

And this is why many ISPs don't give log access to the people they host for

Too many user will run around screaming "Somebody's stealing my stuff! WAAAAAAH!"

Look, robots.txt is a gentleman's agreement. The internet is open for all, not just gentlemen.

WELCOME TO THE INTERNET!
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABUSED TODAY?

Please take some time to re-read that, and disabuse yourself of the idea that you can control other people - the only control you have over them is going to be control they will also have over you.

Secondly, if it really bothers you, block, ban, tarpit, data-spam, whatever the heck you want out of them. If they dare contact you, you can give them whatever you want, however you want. Send them data from random at a rate of 2 bytes per second. Drop half the packets they send you. Abuse the TCP/IP protocol and see if their software is robust enough to handle it. Make it just annoying enough to contact your website in certian ways that they will put you on their 'do not spider' list. Here's a simple example.

But, man get a grip. Seriously. Do you honestly think you are the first person to discover the dark underbelly of corporate money making schemes on the net?

-Adam

Check out Circuit Cellar Magazine -- they are a steady stream of articles and advertisements covering just the thing you want to do.

While you're reading it, also pay attention to PIC Chips and Basic Stamps, which would be a great way to control your orbs without needing a PC (especially the cheaper PIC chips from someone like Microchip Technology)

If you're married to the PC concept, you'll also find advertisements for devices which are controllable via USB. Kinda nice for furure serial-less PCs.

Lastly, though it's a bit out of date at this point, take a look at "Controlling the World With Yor PC" by Paul Bergsmann (ISBN: 1878707159). Great stuff about parallel port interfacing.

Good luck!

For general PIC support, there are a couple active mailing lists, the big one is the piclist, and there is a website that will give you plenty of (3rd party) info on the PIC and the mailing list. There is even some GNU/Linux work being done with Linux, try out Gnupic. Of course, you can always go to the manufacturer.

I strongly second this recommendation.
Another good one is Nuts and Volts magazine. I have bought a copy of Nuts and Volts every month for about a year now, it's probably time to subscribe.
Depending on what hardware stuff you are into, another site to check out is the the piclist.