Physical buttons. Not just physical buttons but physical buttons but physical buttons mapped to all the functions one would regularly use on a calculator.
Every time I try to use an emulator or 'soft' "scientific calculator" I find data entry is much slower.
In my case my program was not documented. Making the program was my 'studying'. I had a program for every ME course I took. For example in Fluids I had a very nice (but hard to understand) GUI. You gave it what you know and what you were looking for and it'd step you through the work. It'd show you the page numbers the equations were on and everything. Now I probably spent 4x as long making that program as my peers spent studying. And by time I ran through enough practice problems to help me learn the material I practically had the methodology memorized. Once I got to the test I almost always did fine without the program and then just used it to verify my results. But that's how I studied.
In Design of Experiments class I wrote a program that did every sort of test you could possibly want. Trying to figure that out on something as archaic as a TI-BASIC took some work but as in the case above it helped me understand what I was doing more than just running through it by hand. I saw it as 'teaching the computer to do something' which anytime I teach someone else to do something I find I often learn it better myself.
Now if I just handed that to someone else and said "here, this is how I got an A on that last test" they'd probably find it useless since it was essentially just my own personal crib sheet.
Nothing still does units quite as easily as my TI-89. I take it everywhere and anytime we're with a supplier/customer that insists on non-metric (or even worse a mix of metric/non-metric) I just let the '89 sort it out.
I use it all the time to verify that I'm doing unit cancellation correction.
The Pi runs a RTOS? The M3 the Due runs has a port of FreeRTOS.
I'd put the Due in my car to run it. I'd put the Pi in to run the stereo. Because the last thing I want when going down the highway is the ethernet subsystem decide it needs to hiccup and the subsystem to fire the spark fails.
It's a proto tool. You never leave a Due where you design it for. You figure out how slow of a processor you can get away with. You figure out how much IO you really need and you get the smallest Atmel or TI chip that supports that.
> The Pi is the best microcontroller on the planet for certain applications.
No. no it is not. The guy that designed the BrewPi doesn't even use the Pi to control the low level PID. It's not stable enough. He uses a real microcontroller at the bare level and the PI is pretty much just a debian computer running rrdtool and the web front end.
The Pi isn't a microcontroller. Will you people stop equating them. They're tiny and they're boards but one is not the other.
As far as the LaunchPad. I'd love to try it out but they've so heavily tied to their Windows GUI that it makes it hard to work on anything else.
The nice thing about the Arduino is that I can quickly write a sketch to do analog and digital IO. Yes I know how to read spec sheets and setup all the registers to control the pins but the Arduino abstracts all that. I setup pin 13 to do output then just digitalWrite the pin high or low. Same with interrupts.
I'm running Unstable on my server and run update & upgrade once a week. On my laptop I'm running testing and do the same. The number of updates are about equivalent.
Why bother with a VPN? That of which we do not speak is $50 for 1TB. That's lasted me over an entire year of just my TV shows. I max out my home cable connection. I don't have to deal with seeding.
My company is migrating to git for all of our versioning control. I got to be the person to fly to the UK and get everyone up to speed on it. I knew it was British slang but not the full connotation of such.
I think you Brits need to make the next generation versioning system and call it fucker/bastard just to get us back.
I couldn't imaging standing up in front of my managers manager. "Well yeah, we're moving to bastard next. Bastards not too hard to use. You just type 'bastard clone'...."
Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY APPLE INC. AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES,.....
Fixed point is very much a lost art. There should be an entire class dedicated to it and anyone in ME or EE that wants to do robotics should be forced to take it. We have to train every single CS, ME and EE that comes in how to do it in Simulink (We use auto code generation and fixed point everything before production).
I do embedded controls and floating points are 'expensive' with most of the chips we use. They're still not that common. But people don't understand how much faster they can be than floats when your stuff doesn't have an FPU.
I picked up an Arduino and ran some floating point vs fixed point benchmarks:
Each of these calculations was run 500,000 times. d=a+b; e=c+b-a; f=a+b+c; g=a*b*c;
Now when you're using a 16 Mhz controller to make das blinken lights it doesn't matter. But when you start getting into autonomous control and trying to do real time processing of a few dozen sensors to make sure your flying robot doesn't smash into the wall it does matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Physical buttons. Not just physical buttons but physical buttons but physical buttons mapped to all the functions one would regularly use on a calculator.
Every time I try to use an emulator or 'soft' "scientific calculator" I find data entry is much slower.
In my case my program was not documented. Making the program was my 'studying'. I had a program for every ME course I took. For example in Fluids I had a very nice (but hard to understand) GUI. You gave it what you know and what you were looking for and it'd step you through the work. It'd show you the page numbers the equations were on and everything. Now I probably spent 4x as long making that program as my peers spent studying. And by time I ran through enough practice problems to help me learn the material I practically had the methodology memorized. Once I got to the test I almost always did fine without the program and then just used it to verify my results. But that's how I studied.
In Design of Experiments class I wrote a program that did every sort of test you could possibly want. Trying to figure that out on something as archaic as a TI-BASIC took some work but as in the case above it helped me understand what I was doing more than just running through it by hand. I saw it as 'teaching the computer to do something' which anytime I teach someone else to do something I find I often learn it better myself.
Now if I just handed that to someone else and said "here, this is how I got an A on that last test" they'd probably find it useless since it was essentially just my own personal crib sheet.
Nothing still does units quite as easily as my TI-89. I take it everywhere and anytime we're with a supplier/customer that insists on non-metric (or even worse a mix of metric/non-metric) I just let the '89 sort it out.
I use it all the time to verify that I'm doing unit cancellation correction.
You have to go to a website? How quaint. I just have SickBeard sit and watch RSS feeds and grab stuff the second it's available.
It's pretty much a DVR minus the commercials.
Yeah, everything they seem to have listed is all relatively new.
Pippin, MacTV, Copland, Cube, eWorld, What ever happened to ClarusWorks after it got spun off?
They're not our friends now? You mean like how we armed all of Iran so they could fight those darned Soviets?
Switched 11 years ago and haven't regretted it once.
We mainly just put them in jail and punish them for the addiction.
Because unlike all those commie socialist countries in Europe, that actually works. (Or so my Republican candidate for senate tells me).
They probably did a steganography on some key frames in the movie.
#2 is diesel.
The Pi runs a RTOS? The M3 the Due runs has a port of FreeRTOS.
I'd put the Due in my car to run it. I'd put the Pi in to run the stereo. Because the last thing I want when going down the highway is the ethernet subsystem decide it needs to hiccup and the subsystem to fire the spark fails.
It's a proto tool. You never leave a Due where you design it for. You figure out how slow of a processor you can get away with. You figure out how much IO you really need and you get the smallest Atmel or TI chip that supports that.
> The Pi is the best microcontroller on the planet for certain applications.
No. no it is not. The guy that designed the BrewPi doesn't even use the Pi to control the low level PID. It's not stable enough. He uses a real microcontroller at the bare level and the PI is pretty much just a debian computer running rrdtool and the web front end.
The Pi isn't a microcontroller. Will you people stop equating them. They're tiny and they're boards but one is not the other.
As far as the LaunchPad. I'd love to try it out but they've so heavily tied to their Windows GUI that it makes it hard to work on anything else.
The nice thing about the Arduino is that I can quickly write a sketch to do analog and digital IO. Yes I know how to read spec sheets and setup all the registers to control the pins but the Arduino abstracts all that. I setup pin 13 to do output then just digitalWrite the pin high or low. Same with interrupts.
Depends. Stable, Testing or Unstable.
I'm running Unstable on my server and run update & upgrade once a week. On my laptop I'm running testing and do the same. The number of updates are about equivalent.
Spoken like someone that has never seen a trike. They're very popular among the older Harley crowd.
Why bother with a VPN? That of which we do not speak is $50 for 1TB. That's lasted me over an entire year of just my TV shows. I max out my home cable connection. I don't have to deal with seeding.
Just use Sickbeard and XBMC.
I still argue that Palin lost it for the Republicans in the last election. You had an option of a guy that spoke his mind and OMG NO.
There was no reason to pander to the super far right, but they did it anyway.
Even if I was Git was written by a Finn.
Where did I use the words "USA"? Or even say where I was from?
Get "us" non-British English speaking citizens of the world.
My company is migrating to git for all of our versioning control. I got to be the person to fly to the UK and get everyone up to speed on it. I knew it was British slang but not the full connotation of such.
I think you Brits need to make the next generation versioning system and call it fucker/bastard just to get us back.
I couldn't imaging standing up in front of my managers manager. "Well yeah, we're moving to bastard next. Bastards not too hard to use. You just type 'bastard clone'...."
Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY APPLE INC. AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES,.....
54 MPG for real-world drivers is almost certainly an imaginary number
Odd. I'm a real world driver. In a real world car and I get that.
That 60 MPG is in US gallons.
Fixed point is very much a lost art. There should be an entire class dedicated to it and anyone in ME or EE that wants to do robotics should be forced to take it. We have to train every single CS, ME and EE that comes in how to do it in Simulink (We use auto code generation and fixed point everything before production).
I do embedded controls and floating points are 'expensive' with most of the chips we use. They're still not that common. But people don't understand how much faster they can be than floats when your stuff doesn't have an FPU.
I picked up an Arduino and ran some floating point vs fixed point benchmarks:
Each of these calculations was run 500,000 times.
d=a+b; e=c+b-a;
f=a+b+c; g=a*b*c;
Floating point:
a=1.1298373 b=2.3249869 c=3.8923873
d=3.4548244 e=5.0875368 f=7.3472118 g=10.22
Execution Time: **14528 ms**
Int:
Integer Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=2656
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250000 b=2.3125000 c=3.8750000
d=3.4375000 e=5.0625000 f=7.3125000 g=0.0625000
Execution Time: **348 ms**
Long Int:
Long Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=330336
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250 b=2.3125 c=3.8750
d=3.4375 e=5.0625 f=7.3125 g=10.0625000
Execution Time: **1951 ms**
Now when you're using a 16 Mhz controller to make das blinken lights it doesn't matter. But when you start getting into autonomous control and trying to do real time processing of a few dozen sensors to make sure your flying robot doesn't smash into the wall it does matter.