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Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

I design interfaces for a living, but tinkering with hardware is one of the most satisfying journeys I know. Every now and then, like OP, I play around with different hardware projects. It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project. It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience. I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

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For last 16 years I have designed and manufactured "real hardware" for living (FPGAs, up to 18 layer PCBs, fast interfaces, RF, analog -- running an engineering house now).

Yet I still tinker with electronics outside of the "real hardware work". It just is fun. Especially if you can teach it to others; or give them the everlasting tinkering bug!

Interesting. I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. My ability to play around with electronics was always constrained by my parts budget. What kept me going was the ability to scrounge old stuff from the garbage and take it apart for parts, but then it was the luck of the draw and once things got really integrated that route was closed off.

So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software.

>>I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget.

Same here. You can build virtually anything in software.

Anything, so long as it interacts with the outside world exclusively through a screen, speakers, or API :)

Right? Why didn't someone tell me that these newfangled SDRs worked purely through the magic of softrware.

Missing a /s ? If not, what did you think the 'S' stood for?

There's plenty of hardware tinkering around SDRs though.

Well Software, duh ;).

The point I was sarcastically making was that even in SDRs you still have a downconversion via either Direct Converting or SuperHet to baseband so your signals are in the right frequency reference that you don't completely saturate your DSP/FPGA/CPU.

I love software as much as anyone else but just saying that you can do everything in SW is a bit disingenuous.

But nobody said that.

I wrote "So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software." and the other person wrote "virtually".

I was replying to the second, just adding a "virtually" doesn't absolve you of real-world hardware concerns. If your SDR is getting overloaded because of bad pass-band filtering then no amount of software is going to save you.

A way of rephrasing the previous comments would be: “I only use hardware devices when I need special-purpose I/O (including direct physical measurements and physical effects). All signal processing and logic can be more cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software.”

> cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software

Hardly.

Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery based solutions software based signal processing is right out.

Latency is another, your CPU is going to introduce both jitter and long latency compared to a discrete software solution.

Software also can't handle raw speeds involved in a lot of things. There's not a single CPU out there that can natively handle 5GHz wifi off of the wire. That's why even direction conversion SDRs use a frequency mixer to lower the data rate down to something a DSP can handle.

By cheap, quick, and effective, I’m talking about human labor, not cost of silicon doodads for a commercial-scale product.

If you imagine we’re talking about someone’s hobby prototype projects, designing all of those things you mentioned takes skill, experimentation, time, parts, assembly, likely a team collaboration, etc. The combinations of parts get conceptually complicated and the feedback loops during the development process get slower and slower.

Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc.

But that’s a very different context than what the people several posts up are talking about.

P.S. if you pile your posts with abbreviations your readers have a harder time figuring out what you are talking about.

Loads of people do FPGA development for hobby projects, which isn't "software." FPGAs can dramatically improve problems with latency, jitter, power over software implementations, yet are still quite accessible.

Isn't it software? What is it, then?

I think it is more commonly referred to as hardware design (or simply 'digital design'). I think it's also reasonable to call it software - but I think that even the 'real' hardware development (of ASICs) is starts with a VHDL design.

It's more like a million jumper switches(called LUT in FPGA parlance) that you can configure.

It doesn't share much, if anything with serial software and you use the same tools(VHDL/Verilog/etc) as ASIC design.

> Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc.

Or power, plenty of battery powered things in the hobby space where using discrete hardware optimized for low power usage is necessary. Discrete hardware doesn't have to be an ASIC, it's still possible to string together a opamps and other SMD parts pretty easily these days.

Compiled hamburgers aren't that tasty:)

Virtually anything of couse just means 'not everything'. As a sideproject, I'm building a keyboard, try that in software. Besides, software is sometimes just too slow. There's a reason you have a GPU (yes, it can be programmed, but my point is that it's separate hardware). Certain algorithms are just much better suited for hardware implementations since everything runs in parallel at a very fine-grained scale(cryptocurrency mining for example - the main reason that people are mining with GPU's is that the ASICs are so popular that it's hard to get them).

Yeah; nowadays parts can be cheaper, but to take advantage of that you often have to order from another continent, waiting weeks to get them. The alternative is to build a local stash, but that requires a large upfront investment, and you'll still be missing that crucial part for the current project.

I still like electronics, but software has spoiled me.

I guess half of that satisfaction can be attributed to the fact, that hardware - especially analogue - is not as lenient about errors as software.

If you burn a transistor you burn a transistor - it's now useless for its original purpose, so you have to triple check everything.

Also there are 2nd and 3rd order effects that require experience to catch.

Example: I was really happy that my two 555 timers driving some LEDs were synchronized so good until I realized that they were plugged into the same weak power source, so the voltage drop from power surges triggered them both.

I really got into building simple hardware while in college. For me it was about the physical aspect of it.

Building software is amazing as the barrier is very low and you can iterate and experiment so fast. But 99% of software I've built exists only as 1s and 0s on a hard drive somewhere.

There's something great about physically holding something you've built. I mainly built midi controllers for friends and other weird i/o devices, But the fact that (maybe) they are sitting somewhere collecting dust brings me joy.

It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project.

This might be something to think about when teaching programming to kids as well. Making an Arduino "do" something still involves programming, but with more tactile results and lower expectations for how much it has to resemble a professionally written app.

I feel the same with any project with "physical" results, from electronics to woodwork to fixing a leaking pipe. Don't know why but I get a fuzzy satisfaction that I never do with software.

My previous job involved lots of lab work, soldering, debugging PCB issues, working with optical fibres, et al. Current job pays better and is complex enough, but it's just me sitting behind a screen all day remotely controlling a piece of hardware we just bought from someone else.

I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino

I second that. These days it's very easy to get some hobby projects going in no time and with a very low budget. Arduinos, FPGAs, simple PCB design, it will give you satisfaction and you'll definitely learn lots useful stuff in the process that's not necessarily tangentially related to software

It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience.

I totally agree with this sentiment, but I would add: I know a guy who designs hardware for a living, and he gets a huge kick from of writing a little Python script. The thrill is mostly in developing fledgeling skills far from your main wheelhouse.

I couldn't agree more, but these days Arduinos are both limiting and expensive.

Consider checking out an ARM Cortex-M board - you can get an STM32F103 'blue pill'[1] with 20KB RAM, 64KB flash, external oscillators, and a 72MHz clock speed for $5. Plus, it has lots of extra peripherals like a realtime clock which can run off of backup power and periodically wake the chip up from sleep.

The future of embedded development is so bright, you gotta walk around with sunglasses on.

[1]: http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill

My current favorite arm cortex are cypress's psoc. They're basically cortex m0/m3 + embedded cpld that has a direct interconnect to cpu reg/interrupts.

How's the open toolchain support with those chips?

I've also heard good things about NXP's Cortex-M chips - apparently they let you map peripherals to whatever pins you want, which sounds neat. And TI's MSP432 chips apparently have fantastically low power consumption for their performance. Atmel's SAM chips look less promising, with minimal peripherals besides a weird common communication bus that seems to handle things like I2C/SPI/etc, if I'm reading the datasheets right.

Does that sound right? It'd be nice to learn about all of them, but there are only so many hours in a day.

I used one of their Cortex M3 parts on a project a while ago that needed a large number of SPI ports to drive strings of LEDs. Was very easy to get the initial POC working, and their IDE software worked surprisingly well.

Agree re: official Arduinos.

If you still want to use Arduino, I'd highly recommend going for Arduino clones from China. You should be aware that the USB chip is different so you may have driver issues, but I haven't had any issues on Linux. You can get an Uno clone for ~$3.

It's also worth considering moving to the Atmega by itself You can get the chip used in the Uno for $2, set it up on a breadboard, program it with an Arduino as the ISP, still use arduino libs if you want, and eventually move to a custom PCB.

I've considered it, but the cost/benefit calculation makes ARM boards way more attractive.

They are way more capable, and they actually cost less than ~$3 each for a simple QFP48 STM32F103 or STM32F051 board, and the smaller chips start around $0.75 for my PCBs.

Definitely. The STM32Fx line is awesome.

I was mostly thinking about alternatives for people who are currently using Arduino and want to keep the same toolchain, libraries, etc. but at a lower cost. If someone is comfortable moving outside the Atmega ecosystem, I would recommend ARM chips as well.

There is official port of arduino for some nucleo boards. I've chosen one for making commercial product. I can use arduino libraries for prototype, and if it won't fit my needs I can always go with C.

Arduino port is just wrapper around stdperiph HAL...

I switched from using Arduinos to using ESP8266-based devices, partly for cost reasons, but also to gain the on-board WiFi support.

Having a small device with WiFi makes it a lot easier to do interesting things - such as pulling data via Web-based APIs, and submitting readings of sensors to MQ, etc.

Having a "real computer", like a PI, or a blue-pill is nice, but suddenly there is a lot more to think about.

I really like the ESP8266 for small one-offs, but I usually code for them with tons of abstraction, in something like NodeMCU or MicroPython.

Because I can't justify learning the nitty-gritty of some proprietary 'Tensilica' core. Lately I've been meaning to look into using NRF24L01 transceivers for wireless communications in projects, since breakouts for them are less than $1 each and have the same footprint as an ESP-01 module.

"It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience."

Probably a hardware object strikes more senses than a software for being something you can touch, but also feel the loss of it if it breaks, because you can't copy it just like lines of code.

I think its really just that with hardware, you're building something "tangible" that feels like it actually exists in the real world. Meanwhile, with software, all your hard work exists entirely within a virtual space that you really cannot touch.

> ... gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project

Maybe because of the association that "software = free".

Or because hardware is 3d while software is always 2d. Would you get the same appreciation if you made a piece of hardware that connects to a monitor and shows a blinking dot?

That basically what I did by creating a small video console and making games work on this bare hardware. Having it generate sprites on screen from bare hardware was much more fun that using unity on a pc ...

What would be a good project after a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino?

Definitely a star-tracking camera mount for astrophotography.

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-a-cheap-and-simpl...

Learn about getting input - buttons, switches, potentiometers, etc.

Then go for motor control: Servos, steppers, DC motors, relays, solenoids, h-bridges, PWM, etc.

Add in some other sensors - perhaps ultrasonic distance sensing, Sharp IR sensors...

...then move into hacking on a Neato Lidar sensor...

At this point - build a robot?

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