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Going Beyond the 'Stock' Arduino with Justin Mclean (Video)
Justin McLean is probably best-known for his work with Apache Flex. He also started playing with open source hardware before Arduino, and now works with systems like Fritzing, an open source hardware initiative that can take you all the way from initial concept to production-ready PCBs you can have made by a production house -- or make yourself if that's the way you roll. This can be an educational activity, a way to make prototype boards for potential Internet of Things products or even just a fun way to occupy yourself by making LEDs light up.
Had to mention Internet of Things, didn't you.
Remember the parallel port?
It was great for learning and even intermediate robotics projects. Each pin was a bit you could simply read and write the binary, hook the wires up to a breadboard with LEDs, control circuits for stepper motors, etc.
Nowadays since everything is fucking serial, you have to have all this extra crap in the way to serialize and de-serialize the data, and modems on each board. An old Pentium III is cheaper (typically free, people throw them away), and with DR-DOS or MS-DOS installed you're ready to code up 10 lines of C and make the port work. Windows or Linux don't let you get right at the ports / memory without ridiculous kernel drivers, recompiling the kernel in most cases for Linux -- that's how I get my LIRC to control multiple devices simultaneously via parallel port. You can install those older OSs on brand new x86-64 hardware too thanks to onboard BIOS emulation, so anything with a parallel port will work.
Sure, they're not as small as Arduino or a single board computer, but for fuck's sake it's sad seeing people get all excited about the fact someone basically brought back the parallel port interface so we can tinker again like we always could before the serial scourge of USB and SATA. Hint: Now that 40 pin ribbon cables are gone from new hardware, in favour of Serial-ATA the "high performance" SSDs use parallel interfaces like PCIe... It's just fucking sad to me.
Just think of all the layers of abstraction required of the Arduino just to do simple projects that you could do on an IBM XT with no abstractions. Fuck this gay earth.
Great interview.. maybe you could find some more people to talk in the background
Not adrino.
You can still buy parallel port expansion cards for computers, even some of the new smaller form factor ones. For under $10 you can also get already made gpio expansion cards that work on USB and have drivers and various language wrappers already written, or for a little more get ones that will go faster than parallel ever did.
Who needs the Internet of things? Nobody.
But here is something I need: A little device with LED, mini keyboard and relatively huge RAM that is fully programmable and has 30+ days of battery life. Of course, it also needs to be able to programmatically "wake up" from sleep and sound a loud alarm.
There are kickstarter campaigns for $9 PCs with HDMI connection, but nobody works on small, slow devices with extremely long battery life. It's very disappointing.
Love Interviews like this, but less background noise would have made it easier to follow.
Thanks for the interview though, lots of good info!
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
I agree with AC. We need to keep the parallel interface around for the neckbeards that don't understand serial communication in the GHz range. Also, we're going to bring back CP/M because their implementation of swapping to floppy disk was more easily understood by retards.
You are rigor
Why did they took Parallel ports away from us?
Actually i use arduino as a paralelizer and Command IT thought virtual rs233