flyingcircus3

I've used click, and I've used argparse. In my view, a nonstandard library needs to be vastly superior to its standard equivalent to justify adding it as a dependency.

Why is click so much better than argparse?

Sure. But that difficulty all comes down to whose shoulders you stand on. If the peripherals' functionalities and their registers are fully described in a datasheet, and you have a working toolchain, and a viable method for loading binaries, then you are set. Additional libraries on top would make it even easier, but you at least have the device's specifications.

Companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Marvell are notorious for locking down their documentation. If you're not shipping millions of units, they're not going to give you the time of day. And even if they are willing to work with you, they're not going to provide you with full register maps, or really anything that would allow you to be independent of them. Instead, they'll give you binary blobs that handle low level details. Every datasheet is watermarked, and NDAs are required to get them.

Most of the other big players, STMicro, Texas Instruments, Nordic, Microchip, etc, are far more open. Just about all of their parts are well documented, and those documents are freely available.

Every working microprocessor ever created can run bare metal code.

But that's only because there aren't any compelling IOT applications in the consumer space. Companies are the users with distributed assets, not consumers.

My point was more that "transformers", "DSL", and "stacks" all have long established meanings that have been bastardized by unimaginative software companies.

If that's were the case, why would the entire first page of Google search results for "edge computing" refer to IOT, and processing data where it's created?

Just wait until we're running transformers on the edge, using DSL and stacks.

How are we still, 15 years later, stuck in the feigned incredulity stage of android vs ios?

"I don't see how anyone still buys an ____. How can you not see the overwhelming evidence that ____ is unequivocally the better phone?"

If either device can fit in either blank, as it has all over this thread, perhaps that's because there hasn't been any undeniably impactful feature improvements on either platform in the last decade.

That's $10 more than I pay for Mint Mobile.

I've been very disappointed with the rollout of their most recent board, Beagleplay. There are all of these self-congratulatory videos of Jason Kridner at trade shows talking about they're making Embedded Linux more accessible/simple. Yet 4 months after release, the quickstart guides are mostly notes to future quickstart guide editors, or otherwise describe workflows that don't actually work.

If you're debunking a myth about Bob Dylan's audience booing him or otherwise showing disdain for playing electric at a particular concert in 1965, why not mention another concert a year later where that very thing did happen, and we can all listen to it right now on Youtube? The Bootleg Series Volume 4 is a concert from 1966 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The second set is completely electric. The audience claps while he is talking between songs, drowning him out. Someone shouts "Judas" just before the last song, and the crowd cheers approvingly.

The commenter specifically used the word nonplussed in reference to the ranking of this post on the front page. The fact that their surprise and confusion stems from the promotion of unimpressive stories does not change the meaning from surprised and confused to unimpressed.

This meets the criteria of Poe's law. It is equally reasonable to assume _you_ are being sarcastic or serious. If they didn't just recently look up the definition themselves, they wouldn't have commented about the conflict in the two definitions.

Summarizing dictionary.com:

1. Surprised and confused 2. Unperturbed

"Yeah I am really unperturbed" doesn't make sense in context of it's parent.

I'm not sure how you could be nonplussed about this.

I've heard of such tactics referred to as the "polite Japanese no". It's a price so high that it will definitely be refused.

Firmware is software that is specific to its hardware. It is directly configuring/operating the peripherals through their registers.

An embedded device is the alternative to a general purpose computer such as a smartphone or laptop. The users of general purpose computers can decide which applications get run, unlike embedded devices. Of course, other software can limit the user's ability to make those decisions, but that is not an inherent limit of the system, that is an artificial limitation imposed by another person.

I think Zelda games are in a league of their own, and always have been at every generation. The general mechanic is being able to initially explore, yet running into obstacles that prevent you from going many places. Then you solve the necessary puzzles and kill monsters to acquire tools. Finally, you must figure out where when and how to use those tools to overcome those obstacles to travel to previously unreachable areas. Its a very gratifying experience the first time through, and there is a lot of replay value in the games too.

If you have to make the choice between getting a Saleae logic analyzer and a similarly priced oscilloscope, I think the logic analyzer fits more people's use case than the oscilloscope, because digital electronics and signals are more approachable to hobbyists and novices. If you're primarily concerned with decoding digital communications signals, and inspecting their timing, a logic analyzer is the tool for this job.

In advance of what? The first three words on this article's page, beyond the top banner, are "product", "announcements", and "Introducing". What other category of article could you more reasonably expect to encounter after reading those three words?

The reactions in this thread are interesting, because they seem to imply that this is the final straw that has convinced us to not buy Chevrolets and Buicks, as opposed to the last 30+ years of of their products being generally terrible.

I use a separate mp3 player connected over Bluetooth in the car. I still get album art and all necessary controls on the cars touchscreen.

I've used maps/navigation with Android Auto, but really, it's the audio directions that are the killer app, not a visual map. So I usually just set it up on my phone, and not my cars screen.

What else is there to do on a car's touchscreen? Or are we just in the novelty phase of this technology? I'll admit it was a deciding factor in my latest car purchase. But the novelty has worn off, and if it would have been an optional feature with an additional cost, I would certainly have buyer's remorse.

For the first puzzle, code that determines if a value has one bit high, without any if/while/for, here's what I got:

!(x & (x-1)) && x

Was there a "best" solution somewhere? I couldnt get the code window to work.

I'm not talking about the user writing code to move an object. I'm talking about the user clicking features on 3D objects with their mouse (like a specific vertex), having those features become highlighted, drawing the visual cues that let the user know that they are in "Move" mode, showing distances and angles to give the user the necessary feedback, clipping to features like midpoints, etc.

Really, the piece that drove me to eventually give up was getting a vertex or edge to be selected, rather than the whole object. Its not difficult to calculate for simple shapes, but what is really needed is a general solution, that doesn't depend on shapes being regular polygons.

I've played around with both three.js and babylon.js, in attempts to make a CAD system. Where I get in over my head is moving objects relative to each other. For example, I need cube A's top right front corner to be 10mm left of the midpoint of cube B's rear face, left edge. Fusion360 can select any of these edges, vertices, etc, and gives you the controls and necessary visual feedback, with distance, angles and alignments.

Trying to implement even the simplest version of this has been a project killer.

It's been fascinating for the last couple of years to see how these daily armchair epidemiologist threads have transitioned from largely in support of vaccines to now largely against them.

It seems there is some natural filtering at play. People looking for rational informed discussion about covid have realized it's no longer on HN, so they just don't participate anymore. Meanwhile,those who think this is all a giant conspiracy have found fellow travellers with bottomless cynicism, and those people now dominate these threads.

If the registers are abstracted away, you're left relying on other people's code. I suppose learning microcontrollers can mean different things to different people, but as for becoming a professional embedded developer, micropython and Arduino are dead ends. There is no transition to truly understanding the hardware.

I think AVR is a good architecture to learn on, because the devices are far simpler than ARM or other more modern chips. The main concept to master as an embedded developer is operating a device by its registers. The common arduino device, ATMEGA328, has a total of 84 registers across all peripherals. A simple program to blink the LED is less than 10 lines total. The datasheet is tiny compared to most ARM devices, but is still a complete source of information.

There are lots of libraries online that demonstrate how to set up registers for various peripherals. Avrgcc is an open source toolchain, and avrdude can program devices running the arduino bootloader.

I don't think the arduino software ecosystem is a good path to becoming proficient in embedded development. The very concepts that you need to really understand well, working with registers and understanding the microcontroller as a set of digital circuits, are abstracted away.

With that goal in mind, I see simple devices like AVRs as a better first device because there is just less to configure. There's less to debug when things go wrong. There's only one clock domain. The datasheet is far shorter than most ARM devices.

When I look at the example projects for devices I use at work, such as nrf52, or stm32, and then try to put myself in the shoes of someone learning this for the first time, they seem overwhelmingly complex, when compared to similar examples for AVR parts.

I must admit that AVR hardware debugging is miles behind ARM though.

I think they are an easier architecture to learn about microcontrollers than ARM. The atmega328, used in a lot of arduino boards, only has 84 peripheral registers. At least with avrgcc, a program to blink an LED is less than 10 lines. Every ARM device I've used is far more complex, both in register count, and minimal code examples. The ability to understand all of the hardware of an entire device is much more attainable on an AVR.

Another big draw is all of the daughterboards that use the arduino headers. No other ecosystem besides perhaps the raspberry pi has anything close to the amount of compatible boards.

So much evidence, which was so well reported, that you can't be bothered to provide any falsifiable details whatsoever.