Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine?

MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"

Comments

Circuit Cellar

[Anonymous Coward]

A fantastic hobbyist type magazine. Our community college has a student subscription for it, definitely worth it. Edited by Steve Circia, name should ring a bell!!

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

Yep that was number one on my list. You might want to add Nuts and Volts as well.
Oh and the entire internet for software.
I really miss Byte :(
Oh and this as well http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Re:Circuit Cellar

[negRo_slim]

Am I the only still buying copies of 2600?

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct. I rarely post or reply here, but I lunged at this one. Very gratifying to see you beat me to it.

To give you an idea, the latest issue of this magazine includes a quaternion-based combined accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles-- and it's pretty good. There's also a good summary of cool new and emerging parts, and fairly often some high-profile design contests that are absolutely accessible to hobbyists.

And yes, you'll occasionally see source code listings. Though the website is used thoroughly as well.

I write embedded software for a living, and let me tell you, if you want to get back to that 1980s feel of knocking out your own computer just because you can, then hacking around to see what you can pull off with it, modern microcontrollers are awesome, and they are cheap, cheap, cheap. Add to that the cheap fab 'n' slab shops that not just print PCBs but will populate them with your parts, and you're off and running even if your soldering dexterity sucks.

Also, I would say that "Make" has its place, and that is getting people to be creative comfortably within their skill space. The long term strategic goal for that magazine is probably as an easy entry point to get people back into a mindset where they realize that they can, in fact, build things themselves. I consider that goal strategically important for the global economy, as well as the Bright Shiny Future.

But "Circuit Cellar" ("Circuit Cellar Ink" if you want to go back a bit) is an excellent thing to read and hack around with. Sometimes just seeing what other people have managed to pull off is half the fun. Much of that stuff finds its way into real-world applications, just like "Byte" and "Dr. Dobb's Journal" once trained an armada of people who changed the world (thank you, Michael Abrash).

Best wishes and happy hacking,
      Matt Heck
      Senior Software Engineer, ECast, Inc.
      Former Director of Special Projects, TechShop, LLC

Make

[WarwickRyan]

From O'Reilly is about the only one which I can think of.

I like this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try looking at http://www.nutsvolts.com/. It has electronic and some programming at very low level.

Maximum PC

[mlauzon]

Maximum PC is a great magazine.

Pragmatic Programming is another great option

[KhazadDum]

If you're looking for a replacement to the likes of Software Developer, Dr. Dobbs Journal, then please check out Pragmatic programming. As a hobbyist programmer, I enjoy the different articles, from metaprogramming to Facebook app development.

Arduino

[BitZtream]

Personally I prefer working with ATmega's directly rather than with Arduino, but ... if you want to futz around and LEARN, Arduino is a good place for it. Lots of tutorials and others willing to help. Lots of neat plugin boards for sensors IO. Lots of choices of example software from FreeRTOS to VGA output on a pin (both of those aren't designed for the arduino framework, but porting them should be rather trivial once you get to the point where you would consider porting them.

If you're using Windows, I'd suggest just using the AVRstudio from Atmel and WinAVR (GCC for AVR chips if you want to use C/C++ instead of just ASM). You can start with the Arduino development environment and move up later. Its free. The Arduino environment is really just a replacement for your main() with a while(1) loop on the standard AVR toolchain anyway

Arduino has lots of examples and information, but from a debugging standpoint, its the worst there is.

AVR Studio from Atmel has a nearly perfect simulator, and if you use something like HAPSIM you can simulate other hardware as well, such as serial ports, buttons, leds and a specific LCD.

If someone would add some decent debugging abilities to Arduino it'd be a useful development environment for me, but debugging through the simulator might be a little overwhelming for a newbie I guess.

I used to roll my own boards for ATmegas, now I just use Arduino boards, price is more than the processor, but cheaper than rolling the whole board yourself unless you do it in numbers, the Arduino hardware is the best way to go if you're talking quanities less than 10 for sure, probably cheaper all the way up to the 100s if you're hand assembling.

Re:Arduino

[spinkham]

BBB is much cheaper then the official arduino at any quantity if you don't need the USB after programming or shield compatibility. Same for the arduino pro, which is more expensive, but has shield compatibility and requires no assembly.

Seeeduino is slightly cheaper then the official version and has some cool hardware features missing from the original.

Your first one should probably still be the official arduino board, however. If you need a large quantity, you can save a bundle with the BBB or RBBB.

Re:Arduino

[Achra]

Another vote for working with the ATMega (or ATTiny) chips directly rather than via the arduino framework. The arduino boards are neat and everything, but expensive ($20-$30ish) I'd hate to lose one inside of a design. That is to say, when I design and build something, it is for permanent. I want to place a $5 microcontroller in there, not a $35 piece of development prototyping hardware.. and the dealbreaker: Arduino code is not compatible with bare ATMega chips. I recommend ladyada's minipov3 kit for learning Atmel microcontrollers: http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=20 $17.50, built-in programmer, battery-pack, ATTiny2313 microcontroller, LED's on the outputs.. You can't go wrong. The parent's comments about debugging are well-founded as well. Check this out: http://www.nkcelectronics.com/avr-jtag-ice-clone-debugger-programmer-kit.html an $18 JTAG ICE for ATMega16/32/64/128 chips. I never thought that I'd be doing step-in/step-over IDE debugging on target hardware with a $20 piece of debugging equipment at home. The future is here.

Manufacturer websites

[vlm]

I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line-by-line, and figuring out how sound, graphics and input devices worked along the way.

They only existed in the 80s because the device manufacturers had no way to distribute large multi page paper documents for free. Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.

Nowadays, if you want to learn how to make sound, or program a LCD, or run a A/D converter, you just download the appnotes from the manufacturers website, typically you get a PDF explaining in great detail how it works, schematics, and example code to get you started out. Some manufacturers go further and sell demoboards for a really modest (probably subsidized) fees.

Either the manufacturer's appnotes are so simple and clear that a "D" student could figure it out, or they go out of business and are replaced by a manufacturer with better tech writers. The quality level is generally excellent.

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[ffreeloader]

You must be very young. I can remember when even Computer Shopper had some decent technical articles. I learned a lot from it.

I can also remember when there were multiple magazines about anything technical. From computers to hotrodding you could find a lot of very technical how-to projects that took months for the magazine to complete. Every aspect of the project was gone over in great detail, unlike the vast majority of what you find on the internet today that is very, very cursory information. Back in the day a good article on hotrodding would tell you how to cc and modify the cylinder head combustion chambers to provide even power from all cylinders in your engine, or tell you how to completely rebuild and strengthen the transmission or rear differential in your car, or how to build drive train from beginning to end to get the most performance and longevity out of it. The last type of article would teach you to understand cam lobe technology and how it affects the power band of your engine, how to match heads and intake manifold, to the cam. How to match compression ratio to all of that, and then how to match your clutch, transmission, and rear end to the engine. The amount of knowledge those magazines made available was incredible.

The old computer magazines were just as thorough in their approach to computing as the good hotrod magazines were to hotrodding. Even Radio Shack had a decent reputation for technical projects. Now they're nothing interesting at all. Thirty years ago you could buy almost anything you could think of in electronic components from them. They'd even sell you a build-from-scratch computer kit. Not the greatest computer in the world even for that time, but a great learning project. Nothing like it even exists today.

I take exception to that...

[crazipper]

...as the guy who manages it today and is still every bit as enthusiastic about tech as I was when I was working at SharkyExtreme.com, when Tom was still running *his* site. :-P