Mark Woodward wrote: > Hardware hacking? The older guys, like > myself, who actually own oscilloscopes and soldering irons may be all > over it. The GenX'ers who grew up after ISA proto cards may not be so > inclined, but, who knows?
10 years ago after all the hobby magazines dried up, I would have agreed, but Make Magazine and a small handful of web sites seem to be thriving on old-school hardware hacking. Speaking of oscilloscopes, anyone interested in a big 1970's era Techtronics? It worked the last time I tried using it - probably 10 years ago - but is effectively useless, having the same capability of a $200 hand-held. I'd hate to trash it, and I'm not sure some collector would buy it on eBay, but starting to think it is taking up too much space to hang onto it. (The cart it is on might actually be nicely repurposed as a welding cart. Maybe I'll stick the scope on a shelf and do that.) > Having done embedded work, I'm looking forward to experimenting with > this thing. The arduino project really shows the power of the open > source methodology. Embedded systems are typically so arcane and usually > require a huge learning curve just to get started. I've been casually keeping an eye on the Arduino. After doing a bunch of embedded stuff in the late 80's, over the years I've bought into a few different "quick start" embedded platforms (Paralax's packaging of the Microchip PIC, and then some AMD microcontroller, if I remember correctly), but they've largely sat in the box unused. So I'm reluctantly to but-in to another platform, no matter how tempting it seems to get it to just play around with it, unless I have a compelling project lined up. I do run across the occasional project where a micro would really come in handy, but then I hit a sort of catch-22 - not having good familiarity with an embedded platform means I can't knock out a solution in a few hours (or days). Which means the threshold for compelling is even higher. Really, building anything from scratch, even if it doesn't require days of building and software debugging, is hard to justify these days. A recent project I considered was a garden light meter. Something I looked for last year, and didn't find a commercial solution. This year I found and bought a commercial product: http://www.amazon.com/Luster-Leaf-1875-Rapitest-Calculator/dp/B002XZLLXU/ with disappointing results. It's fine for their described use case: you have a spot in your yard where you want to plant something, and you want a simple guide for what type of plant to select that will do best in that light level. Less effective if you are selecting the location for a vegetable garden and want to compare multiple locations to see which one has the most hours of full sunlight. I considered creating a quick hack by joining a solar panel and a hour meter (as found in heavy machinery). I saw that some (digital) hour meters had separate battery and control inputs. It would likely still need a battery and some glue components to match the "full sun" output voltage from the cell to the control threshold on the hour meter. (Using a solar panel with 12 V output would make it too expensive. You'd quickly be over $30 in parts.) Of course an Arduino with a cadmium cell attach to an A-to-D input, and some LCD display "shield" would be far more flexible. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
