Comment by shadowOfShadow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowOfShadow | Hacker News Reader

Look, we can bolt training wheels to embedded!

This is all fun for sparking creativity, but it always seems like a massive diss to the EE's in the crowd when web devs run around fronting that they are going to disrupt the embedded world with their transpiled bloatware. EEs are so stupid and use such crap tools!!! Put some damn Bootstrap on that circuit-to-PCB layout tool. It's so not even flat OR responsive! How the fuck am I supposed to drag-n-drop my codez?!?!?!

My favorite is when someone posts a vid of LED PWM or, worse, just basic blinking... You spent how much time and money on what? And you created the embedded version of the blink tag? Definitely a web developer.

Tester board acquired. Let's go find some problems!

Can't wait until craigslist is full of requests for bringing a dream device to fruition... It'll be an iPhone-killer that also sets the temperature of your house and blinks to let you know your dog bowl just tweeted you and donate a bitcoin to the NSA because you forgot to put the induction recharger next to the eFacuet controller this morning. Equity only. NDA required.

One person converts an arduino or whatever to a red-inked start-up that gets taken out for $1B and it's on...

I agree with you but I am thinking that your point on bolting training wheels might be more valid than sarcastic.

See getting into full EE is a serious amount of work (I get it, whilst I work on ML stuffs I have spent time in the embedded space; and the web crowd could learn a lot from the embedded folks). I do however wonder how many people would be willing to undertake the effort if they had a toy to hook their interest at the start.

Me, I will happily stay with my FPGA's and verilog, but then I grew up on computers that were meant to be messed with (e.g. the spectrum), in an era where my parents encouraged me to take apart, _understand_ and mend electronics.

Today it feels like this is no longer the case and that bugs me.

Maybe as a toy this fulfills that niche ?

History and Moore's law would tell us that at some point we won't have to fiddle bits for every single embedded project.

Is that time now, maybe not. But it seems like a great tool to prototype with. I'm really confused how enabling a whole legion of programmers to get creative with hardware invokes such bitterness in you.

I'm sure what you do is very special, and this is no direct threat to that.

And history of embedded systems tells us that at all times you will have to fiddle bits for nearly all embedded projects.

MCU's are getting faster at the expense of getting power hungry. Plus there are a several other things that need low level optimization that C provides. There is a reason why C has such a invincible death grip in the embedded domain. It will take you trillions of dollars worth of investment and nearly two decades of effort if you have to dethrone C from there. Nearly every stake holder, is so deeply entrenched in C its not even pragmatic to think you are going to replace at anytime sooner.

>>I'm really confused how enabling a whole legion of programmers to get creative with hardware invokes such bitterness in you.

All programming, is creativity with hardware. Because the form factor got smaller doesn't mean a thing here.

This is the gripe I have with many Rasberry Pi Users, who call printing hello, world 10 times with a python script as 'hardware hacking'. The situation is so super hilarious.

Say you wrote the same Python script on a laptop with the cover removed, now that you see the electronics inside the laptop and you are also running the python script, did you just got magically creative with hardware? Why wasn't it magic when the electronics wasn't visible.

And yes, for any real creative thing of production and mass deployment value. All the best trying to do it in anything apart from C.

Moore's is about transistor density on an IC.

When the target embedded circuit needs (and energy needs) are far, far tidier, it is laughable to think that a bunch of wasted IC overhead will undercut any advantage to developing the prototype on a board like this. Simple things can and will be simple.

ATMEGA's are looking for problems. General devices don't compete with specialized. See CPU vs. ASIC's in bitcoin. Hi bitcoin miners with GPU's... show me your hands. Here's your ass back.

And I think that's the comment's point. These prototyping platforms are nice for some narrow band of testing ideas, but don't translate for the "hacking the internet all the things!!!" when compared to what the trained circuit-designers do in their sleep and get mass-produced by morning coffee.

I can make drop-shadows in photoshop and you use CSS3? I'll just use the data layer plugin to make the bestest sites evar!

The point is not that EE suck; it's that if the IoT market starts growing explosively, as many expect it to, there'll be a penury of EE skills, and the market will belong to whoever allows to circumvent that penury.

Originally, web applications were best written by Unix developers; but PHP and the likes allowed to write them without growing a neckbeard, and took pretty much everything.

>This is all fun for sparking creativity

And if there's one thing EE's hate it's fun.

Clearly illustrated by his post.

The thing is, hardware manufacturers might be all for something like this - if it means they can increase their market from x embedded developers to 100 times more web developers. They are already trying to make embedded development drag and drop - an example is this tool by Infineon called 'DAVE' - not sure how successful it is, but its built around modular components that you drop into your project.

http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontrollers/deve...

Of course its all written in C, but you get the idea.

it would be like saying , since we lack of physicians , let's hire butchers to do their job...because they both use knives...

webdev and embedded dev are totally different fields of programming.

And hardware manufacturers dont need 100x new programmers, if these new programmers cant even work with C or ASM...

This sort of thing breaks the very moment you have to bring in your own customizations and changes. And that is super common in a embedded system.

Otherwise it wouldn't be much of an 'embedded system'. It would be a general computer.

Drag and Drop code generation doesn't work in embedded programming for the very same reasons it doesn't work with higher level languages. Its far too inefficient,code subject to total redesign for small changes in feature requests and beyond all its not economical.

Some day we may get there. But some day we may not even have the need to program anything. Forget embedded systems, but programming in general.

Donate a bitcoin to the NSA? I want to be your friend.

where this bitterness comes from?

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