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Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

meta: I really like these kind of blogs which are more or less a braindump with heart to it. I'm sure there are many nice nuggets of wisdom and experience if you go through the posts.

To take an example, http://vwlowen.co.uk/arduino/spectrum-analyser/spectrum-anal... about taking a simple 2.4 GHz module and building a spectrum analyzer, is a nice post. You can tell he enjoyed doing it.

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When the Web 5.0 is all hosted on Facebook, the best and more impassioned learning material will still be hand-written in HTML 4 on some old radio ham's personal web site that's been lovingly crafted for some 30 years.

If you can stand the video format, this one is unusually rewarding for being a youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff

I started with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la-sGpTpkxE

"My old BBC Micro system" ... which kind of established his credibilities in my mind, and then I just kept going, devouring his entire channel. Recommended - this guy knows his stuff, and unlike certain other youtube channels in this genre there is no annoying bravado.

A rack version of a BBC Model B, nice.

Watching that BBC Micro video made me sorry i missed that era. Doing anything like that these days would be just, ugh, painful. Too many layers, both hardware and software, to dig through to get anything close to brass tacks, and we keep adding more every odd year or so...

Don't be sad, there are plenty of opportunity still! And, there's much more easily found information and help :)

A suggestion is to buy eg a MSP430 Launchpad ($10) or STM8 development board (<$1 on Aliexpress) and write simple programs for those. Those cpus are very simple and great starting points.

You can simulate those old 8 bitters easily enough on modern hardware and re-live that time to your hearts content.

You'll become an ace at optimization and memory conservation.

One of my long-time project ideas is a BASIC interpreter (Commodore-style) for the ESP8266 or one of the more powerful Arduinos, with statements to control GPIO pins or I2C devices and a web-based REPL. It would be great for teaching.

Have you seen this? BASIC interpreter hidden in the ESP32 ROM.

https://hackaday.com/2016/10/27/basic-interpreter-hidden-in-...

That's pretty close indeed! Lost my idea (almost, the web-based IDE would be a bit easier to work with, and TinyBasic did not have strings or floating point), but on the other hand it must have been a good one. ;-)

meta-meta: reading my own comment above, I can see how it is actually quite similar to those auto-generated spambot-comments in format, I hope it doesn't say much about my inner self :S. Then again, that's just what a spambot would say.

You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, it's belly baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn it'self over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?

Love it, looking forward to the sequel that seems to keep the same look and feel.

(awkward reply to "why is that?" though)

way to dodge the question replicant!

Excellent post, with good informations and circumscribed.

Thanks for picking this one out, it looks perfect to have a tinker with whilst trying to diagnose my wifi issue here at home. I suspect I have a tonne of interference, but the HackRF route seemed a little over the top. This is much better!

Beware that depending on what kind of trouble you might have, the update rate of that analyzer might be several orders of magnitude too slow.

Interference is likely nowadays, with wifi in every apartment and everywhere, but one thing to consider is if you have any really old equipment on your wifi? If you have eg an 802.11b thing on the network, the router (perhaps the other devices too) downgrade to 802.11b too, to have a common denominator.

Interesting to hear your results, please do share later!

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