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Going Beyond the 'Stock' Arduino with Justin Mclean (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the traveling-with-gun-and-camera-through-the-wilds-of-open-source dept.

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.

1 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Really sad. Older PCs are still better at this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    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.