[Arm-netbook] riki200 v3 first print: success

[Philip Hands]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
>> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> writes:
>
>>>  yep he recommended to the arduino package maintainer that the actual
>>> core parts not be glommed together with a runtime and IDE and
>>> everything else.
>>
>> Well, I reacted badly to the Java UI (because it was ludicrously broken
>> under tiling window managers --
>
>  ohh that's right.  you use xmonad.  written in 1200 lines of haskell
> if i recall.  fricking awesome and scary at the same time :)
>
>> the menu required you to click the
>> screen elsewhere to get anywhere, and my screen wasn't wide enough to
>> click anything on the sub-menus ;-) ), and noticed that it was actually
>> possible to use a Makefile, and that there were several Makefiles in
>> circulation, so chose what looked to be the most maintained one, and
>> suggested that the author pick up the nice features in the other ones,
>> and then stuck that together as the arduino-core package.
>
>  cool!
>
>  yyyeah... have you noticed btw that the way they do "finding of
> libraries" is... to indiscriminately extend make's "VPATH".  all and
> any headers, object files, modules, executables... *all* of those are
> searched for in *every single one* of the paths.
>
>  if you happen to have the same filename somewhere anywhere in those
> paths, you're hosed.
>
>  it's a total global namespace .... nightmare.  nnnngh!  whyyyy do
> they doo thiiiiis!
>
>
>> As it happens, I fired up my arduino for the first time since doing the
>> arduino-core uploads last week -- My 5 year old daughter and I are
>> knocking up something to drive some LEDs and a motor in order to make
>> her IKEA kitchen have a working turntable in the microwave, and a blue
>> LED to simulate water coming out of the tap, etc.
>
>  ha, cool!  yeah i bought something called a "Sparki" robot for me and
> lilyana to play with.  which was for about... 2 days.  the GUI on that
> however i have to say is extremely cool.  it's block-based like a
> jigsaw, and it auto-generates actual code which you can then look at
> to see if it does what you expected.

Sounds somewhat like scratch.

Also in the same vein is the thing from microsoft: 'makecode',
that the Love To Code folk at chibitronics are using in conjunction with
the Chibi Chip:

   https://makecode.chibitronics.com/

makecode also supports other microcontrollers boards, it seems:

   https://makecode.com/

The chibi chip is one of Bunnie's projects, for making it easy to do
clever stuff with circuits made out of sticky copper tape and stick-on
LEDs and sensors -- I'm awaiting one in the post, having found a UK
based seller last week:

   https://chibitronics.com/shop/love-to-code-chibi-chip-cable/

Bunnie gave a nice talk about it at CCC last year:

   https://archive.org/details/media.ccc.de-33c3-7975-making_technology_inclusive_through_papercraft_and_sound

(for which I happened to be on Main Camera, in the video team filming it)

I particularly like his Sauerkraut analogy about always getting the same
outcome if you start with the same ingredients.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY