Anyone have details about about where you get these tiny ferrite cores? I just assumed they were no longer available.
I have a card of core memory from maybe a DEC10, but the fine copper wires woven through the cores are starting to break. Not sure what I should do to preserve it.
This is only tangentially related, but as someone who is incredibly new to the Systems programming world, what would people recommend for getting into Arduino programming? How different is it from programming the GPIO on the Raspberry Pi?
> How different is it from programming the GPIO on the Raspberry Pi?
Conceptually they are they same (just flipping GPIO bits), but practically you can do things with one which you can't do with the other.
There is no operating system on an Arduino, like there is on a Pi. This means you can do much more "real-time" things on an Arduino, like bit-bang a serial port. This is hard to do on a platform with an OS, because the OS process scheduler might pull your program off of the CPU for a few milliseconds. If you need to do something to those pins 1,000 times per second or more, you're out of luck.
If you've ever seen a large scrolling LED marquee sign which appeared to have an occasional "stutter" in the scrolling, that's most likely because it was being controlled by an operating system.
Arduino is for quick validation and prototyping. Pick up an Arduino nano for couple of $ and try it out. The programming language is easy to pick up and will get you a quick app(though basic) app running. It has made electronics accessible to a lot of people. Raspi opens a different world as you have a bunch of other peripherals available for you already builtin, without having to get "shields". There is a large ecosystem of shields available in the arduino world that make prototyping easy. So it may eventually boil down to what you want to do and how much effort you are willing to put in for the project. In my opinion, arduino are good for initial protoyping/weekend projects, and microcontrollers/embedded linux are good for engineering projects and will set you up for a long haul in systems engineering.
The Arduino IDE is fine to begin with. Eventually you may want to grow into dealing with more of the family of Atmel chips, tiny85s can be fun for miniature projects for example.
You'll start to outgrow the Arduino libraries at some point though and may want to switch to the Atmel compilers directly.
For resources the Arduino.cc forum and tutorials are a great place to start. Should be able to find some project ideas as well.
That's an excellent question; one to which I would also like to know (more) about. So far I've thrown a bunch of money at it to just buy random pieces and cobble them together in spare time and see what happens.
So I have raspberry pis; I have arduinos. I've done some simple programming for both, to read from sensors. Water sensors and thermal sensors and buttons and sound pins all on breadboards were fun.
I figured I was ready for the next step: soldering together a kit. So I soldered together an ethernet kit for the arduino. That project fell flat: the arduino powered up while the ethernet shield did not; the arduino reported that it didn't even "find" the ethernet controller even though it was piggy-backed onto it. Usually when you plug in the RJ45 jack to a NIC you at least get the lights on the RJ45 port to light up. But no dice for me here either. And I have no idea how to debug that problem.
I have several of each, but I have to say I tend to prefer an RPi Zero W to any of the alternatives. Right now I have three running, one logging air quality and other sensor data, one acting as a grandfather clock, driving a servo that strikes a long chime on the hour (and is silent at night, when I am at work, etc.), and another which is making calls to a couple of APIs when someone presses my doorbell. The last one likely would be simpler on an Arduino (well, really an ESP8266 like a Wemos D1 mini, say); the other two benefit from having cron, ntp, etc. none of which is as easy on Arduino.
There's a learning curve, but it's not that bad. The biggest constraint is that you are in a very limited "world" in Arduino land, it's very systems programm-y. You don't have a proper OS, you don't have a filesystem. You don't have near unlimited resources. Depending on the chip you use you may have a small amount of RAM. Also, arduino enforces a basic structure on you of having setup() and loop() functions. Once you get used to it it's fine, but it takes some experience to get the hang of it fully.
[+] [-] sllabres|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwsInQLmjXc
[+] [-] Isamu|7 years ago|reply
I have a card of core memory from maybe a DEC10, but the fine copper wires woven through the cores are starting to break. Not sure what I should do to preserve it.
[+] [-] FullyFunctional|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cellularmitosis|7 years ago|reply
Conceptually they are they same (just flipping GPIO bits), but practically you can do things with one which you can't do with the other.
There is no operating system on an Arduino, like there is on a Pi. This means you can do much more "real-time" things on an Arduino, like bit-bang a serial port. This is hard to do on a platform with an OS, because the OS process scheduler might pull your program off of the CPU for a few milliseconds. If you need to do something to those pins 1,000 times per second or more, you're out of luck.
If you've ever seen a large scrolling LED marquee sign which appeared to have an occasional "stutter" in the scrolling, that's most likely because it was being controlled by an operating system.
[+] [-] imagiko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Derpdiherp|7 years ago|reply
For resources the Arduino.cc forum and tutorials are a great place to start. Should be able to find some project ideas as well.
[+] [-] inetknght|7 years ago|reply
So I have raspberry pis; I have arduinos. I've done some simple programming for both, to read from sensors. Water sensors and thermal sensors and buttons and sound pins all on breadboards were fun.
I figured I was ready for the next step: soldering together a kit. So I soldered together an ethernet kit for the arduino. That project fell flat: the arduino powered up while the ethernet shield did not; the arduino reported that it didn't even "find" the ethernet controller even though it was piggy-backed onto it. Usually when you plug in the RJ45 jack to a NIC you at least get the lights on the RJ45 port to light up. But no dice for me here either. And I have no idea how to debug that problem.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berbec|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FullyFunctional|7 years ago|reply