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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.'"
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!!
From O'Reilly is about the only one which I can think of.
The Internet is this magazine.
Make magazine is a wonderful DIY with electronics projects etc.
Try looking at http://www.nutsvolts.com/. It has electronic and some programming at very low level.
Maximum PC is a great magazine.
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
I learned on Byte and Compute! as well but that's because back then that's all there was. That and a few books.
Now there's a gajillion ways now to be a techie. Whether it's coding to the metal or using JavaScript or Flash, using Java or C# or C++ or C or hand coding assembly. The number of ways to get the same buzz I got from those magazines in the early 80s has increased exponentially.
If you're stuck in the 80s though and just want to hand poke hardware then try the Arduino movement or one of these
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/12/fun_games_and_entertainment_open_so.html
And no, I'm not dissing those projects. I'm just trying to say that writing something in JavaScript or Python gives me the same feeling I got back in the 80s from typing in programs out of Compute! It's 2010. I'd much rather be programming in C# on XNA on my PC/360 than in basic or assembly on my Atari800.
If you are intent on bit banging... the available options these days are pretty much limited to microcontrollers, unless you want to end up in huge projects or small modifications on huge projects.
Most of what you can do with these tends to be robotics projects, since there aren't a lot of 8-bit general purpose computers available out there any more.
There are a lot of web sites that provide small source code for special purpose robotics projects which you could apply much in the same way as typing in BASIC games from Compute! or Byte magazine, and then playing with them.
If your intent is to provide a project for a kid, you could do a lot worse than going some place like Weird Stuff, buying up a handful of Compute! magazines and a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive, and a box of 10 floppies. There are plenty of analog TV's out there still to use a monitors which are otherwise sitting unloved in peoples garages.
-- Terry
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.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As others mentioned Make is a good one and 2600 also has a lot more computer/network oriented material lately.
http://www.arduino.cc/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Nut's and Volt's is also a good one. And, I just love the name.
I remember Bytes! Gazette which catered to the Commodore 64 and 128 crowd had this clever input program in Commodore BASIC that would allow the entry of programs by byte-codes. That is, each edition of the magazine had these long list of byte sequences (i think they were 5 chunks to a line, and something like 200 lines for the bigger games) where the first 4 bytes were data and the 5th was a checksum for that line. You would enter these sequences using the BASIC program and it would allow you to proceed to the next line or it would prompt you to re-enter the line if the checksum failed.
:-) Then again, I was only 9 at the time, so I didn't really know any better until my brother-in-law pointed out that I needed to use the BASIC entry program...
The problem was that the BASIC program code was only run every other issue, so if you only bought a few issues from the supermarket you'd probably miss the program and waste several hours entering otherwise meaningless junk into the standard Commodore prompt
Sigh, I still kinda miss those days.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Oh baby .. thats one hot little CPU you have there. Do you like to cluster with other systems, or do you just go down all by yourself?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Although limited to one operating system only both "Linux Developer & User" and "Linux Format" magazines have coding sections that address multiple languages, system details, mini-project ideas, although they are both targeting the beginner coder.
I loved Byte Mag, but it wasn't the only thing I grew up on. I also cut my teeth on Creative Computing Magazine as well - it was one of the few places where one could get the source code for a game, type it in and run it - and then make changes and learn. I grew up typing in every program from every issue, learning with every keystroke. Now my kids need the same thing, but it needs to be in something more current - like Python. If someone made a modern version of this, with VB, Python or whatever, I'd live by it once again!
You might want to look at the "CNET How-To" and "CNET Hacks" HD video podcasts... Hacks even goes into things the companies don't want known, like iPhone jailbreaks.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Outsourcing Magazine
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I like hackaday.com. Has lots of DIY articles as other member's really great projects...
//LIFE WOULD BE EASIER IF I HAD THE SOURCE CODE!
c't (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C't ) is pretty good, if you read German.
The high-end 40-pin DIPs compare favourably to entire home computers from the Byte era. They are programmed in C, can interface to USB, can be set up with their own bootloaders. The code to interface them to SD cards is well known and if you dan't want that, a 4MBit eeprom has more capacity than a 360kB floppy disk. And that's without even getting to the 32bit controllers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In the U.S. there are three general electronics magazines:
Circuit Cellar
Nuts & Volts
Elektor
Of these, Circuit Cellar is the more advanced and covers topics that are probably over the head of most beginners, but it's still worth a read in any case.
Elektor will be familiar to European readers as it's been published in multiple language versions over there for decades. The U.S. edition dates from the beginning of 2009 and contains the same editorial content as the UK edition. The construction articles in Elektor are quite well done and are look very professional. Elektor recently bought Circuit Cellar, but haven't changed the focus of that magazine (yet). Whether they do in the future remains to be seen.
Nuts & Volts is geared more toward hobbyists and beginners, but it's still good for all levels (at least some of it). It has several long-running columns devoted to the Arduino, the PICAXE, and (starting recently) the Parallax Propeller.
Another good option is Everyday Practical Electronics, which is published in the UK and sold by major U.S. chain bookstores.
Although not strictly devoted to electronics, Servo Magazine (published by the same people who publish Nuts & Volts) does cover the electronics aspects of robotics. There is some overlap with Nuts & Volts, but not a lot.
I used to enjoy reading Silicon Chip years ago
just did a quick search and it appears they're still around. Online version of the magazine now as well!
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/
...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
What!? No mention of Dr. Dobb's? /. is slipping.
- Jasen.