The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#80 – Otiose Ontocyclic Opiniasters

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeXQBHLIPcw[/tube]

Thanks to Windell Oskay for the flea market picture!

Comments

  1. Holy crap. I’ve used bits of Arduino at work and at home on custom boards using Windows with the MKII ISP and not had nearly as many issues. I think Dave is just AVR cursed.

    But I agree with his frustration on all the sweeping changes 1.0 made without sensible backwards compatibility considerations. I also will never buy a MKII ISP again when the cheaper clones work better in both AVR Studio and 3rd party IDEs like the Arduino IDE.

  2. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Not Saint-Exupéry

  3. I’m having trouble with the new Arduino IDE V1.0…due to the lack of backwards compatibility….It is very frustrating.

  4. Sure it is a dictatorship and you can write your code in any way you like. But this doesn’t change the fact that shit code is shit code.
    You show the typical hardware guy attitude towards programming – oh, it is only software. Screw you. If software would be so easy, why is there so many shit software out there? And why do you feel inclined to contribute more shit code to the world?
    You just experience first hand what happens if you have to deal with shit code, or why are you so angry about the Arduino IDE deleting your project? See, this happens when clueless hardware guys write software, think it is easy and think they don’t need to listen and learn.

    • Angry software people are angry. But why? If Dave doesn’t impose his code on the world, isn’t it just his problem? (aside from a little moaning about it on the show?). I don’t understand the upset response.

    • Ok, I’ll bite, in what way it my code shit?
      Please be specific.
      Just because I decided to do some inline code (for good reasons at the prototype stage) instead of use a for loop for prototyping?

  5. If you are having trouble with libraries throwing some error about WProgram.h, use the following to make = 100
    #include “Arduino.h”
    #else
    #include “WProgram.h”
    #endif

  6. Dave,
    As far as coding goes, you will figure out whether it is crap when you debug everything. I have had 15 programmers working for me at one time. They always found out whether it works or not, and how efficient it is, when they debugged it.

    As far as burnt wood, sorry not carcinogenic, burnt wood is basically carbon. You can coat it with polyurethane, lacquer, shellac, etc. and it will seal in the smell.

    Also, for a website chip, most of the micro’s already have the ‘demo’ coding on how to publish pages, etc. usually from a SD card, and occasionally from a file server. I work in Microchip land so am not sure about Arduino.
    (I claim BINGO for this episode, LOL)

    Chris, Kilauea volcano has not ceased erupting for several decades. You HAVE to see it at some point in your life. It is a visceral experience.

    Congrats on the HAM license! Let us know when you setup a station and what band you are working. Nothing like practice to get something right.

  7. Simple workaround for the shite 12 bit resolution. Just put those 2 “0” bits back at the end of the code to do the ISP bus to the ADC, and then basically ignore everything else. Then you have a 10 bit chip, and it will be much more linear. The only difference between the 8, 10 and 12 bit chips is the accuracy spec, they are all the same chip, just the best are 12 bit marked, the not so good are 10 bit marked and those that are not DOA but suck are 8 bit marked. All same die, nothing else changed but the binning and the ignored bits are actually still doing something even if they are in the don’t care range. So what if you are actually doing a 8 bit change per step, they are still going to go from 0V to Vref with 1024 steps over the full range as required.

    BTW, loved it, still a nice open bit on doing design. I remember a sound card on my first PC, made from a R-2R network hung off a LPT port card and bit banged to make sound. Still got a ISA bus SB card around…….with the 1x CDROM and caddy. Card works, but no ISA bus to plug into, unless I downgrade to a P133 slot1 board, which still works and runs netware 4.0.

  8. Dave, for non-trivial code you should graduate from the Arduino IDE and use the command line, vi (or any editor), and makefiles.

    • No. If I’m going to advertise my project and code as being Arduino compatible, then I want to use the same IDE everyone else will use. Otherwise I’m not learnign what works and what doesn’t in the Arduino IDE. I don’t want tell other people (beginners) who try and use it, that “the Arduino IDE is shit, don’t use it. Here use this other XYZ method that I use.”

  9. Great show.

    Decent pronunciation of “ass” from Dave.

    I like to see a whole schematic on one D-size sheet, even though it’s impractical.

    I don’t get the whole local production thing. If I have a way to do something cheaper/better/faster in Wisconsin, why would you favor a supplier in your location?

  11. I don’t get all these criticisms about “shit code”. When you hack up something just to see whether something works, you don’t have to write production quality code from the very onset, particularly when debugging hardware. Because you never know, you may need to throw all that code away in the next hardware revision.

  12. I love the fact that there’s plenty of bad code around – it makes mine look awesome by comparison 😀

    Thing is, Dave was showing us his proof-of-concept code. It’s not like he’s going to get it working on his bench one time and then instantly ship that out to his customers. He knows what he’s doing, and it’s obvious that he’ll spend a fair amount of time optimising and modularising the code and making other improvements.

    Nobody would go to such lengths to document such a detailed hardware design and then skimp on the soft/firm ware part, that would make no sense.

    Even the best coders have to “make it work first” and tidy it up later.

    Cut Dave some slack all you haters.

    • Once again. In what way is my code no good?, and why would I have to tidy it up before release? Anyone who wants to complain, please be specific in what you think is wrong, and why it MUST be changed, and what advantages there are to changing it. Otherwise, STFU about the code, really. Code is like PCB layout – give the same design to 100 different programmers and they’ll program it 100 different ways.
      Everyone seems to be bitching about my lack of for loop and using inline code. Why? Because it takes a few extra bytes? The inline code is simple, easy for a beginner to understand in this case (they can see each bit being sent, bit-by-bit, and it’s easy to mod (as I showed in my video). I may change it if I feel that way inclined, or I need to squeeze a few extra bytes out of the project, but otherwise there is nothing wrong with it at all, and there is no reason to touch for release.

      • The loop thing is not about number of bytes it takes. It’s about a reflex against repeated code. I’d say most software folks have a *strong* reflex about that for the following reason: Because the more times a piece of code is repeated, the more chances there are for a mistake/typo to be made, espescially when the code is being changed later.

        I think it’s NOT a problem in this piece of code because of how simple/understandable each repeated segment is. Unfortunately, it still sets off that reflex with some people.

      • I don’t think your code is bad. I never said that. But bad code does exist in the world and I was referring to that.

        I will however STFU from now on.

  14. BTW, if you haven’t found out yet, those runt spikes on the display are the display doing an acknowledgement of the data sent to it. Probably the display driver is a bipolar transistor, when the PIC is a mosfet, so what you are seeing is the bipolar saturation voltage.

  15. The 65C02 is nothing new. Not even in 40-pin DIP and/or at 14MHz. The datasheet for the current version is dated 2010. As far as I can tell, Western Design Center (owned by Bill Mensch, one of the original inventors of the 6502) has been producing 65C02’s since at least 1984 as far as I can tell (see http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/about_us.cfm).

    As far as I can tell, the real news is that WDC now has Jameco and Mouser as distributors so you can buy their chips all over the world and in low (hobbyist) quantities. By the way, Jameco has had old-stock 2MHz 6502A’s available at least since I started my project about a year ago, probably much longer.

    Not that it’s bad news of course, but this “Hey the 65C02 is available again” news has been bouncing around websites and twitter feeds and Facebook etc. and it’s just inaccurate: If you look at websites like 6502.org (e.g. http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=1953), you will know that it was probably never gone in the first place 🙂

    ===Jac

    • I completely agree. The real news is that Mouser stocks them. The 65C02s from WDC are around forever, and you could always buy them directly from their website.

  17. A request: can you guys explain the Arduino vitriol a bit better? Surely it isn’t just because of a crappy UI design around the “Delete” key. Even better, maybe you could assess some other development options for relatively simple embedded systems. I’m probably revealing my n00b status, but I’m amazed at the amount of stuff I’ve been able to do pretty quickly using an Arduino on our electric motorcycle project. Sure, there have been glitches, but I would have hit those with any development system.

    BTW, thanks for the heads up on the HAXLR8R program. I was able to get our application in with 20 minutes to spare! I have no idea if we’ll be picked, but I do have an interview with them tonight.