Still crazy after all these years

[Matthew Carpenter]

On Monday, February 16, 2015 13:57:44 kwall at kurtwerks.com wrote:
> On 2015-02-16 10:55, Tony Alfrey wrote:
> > That is really weird; the /kid/ gives the /old man/ the pi.  These
> > things are (partly) advertised as DIY gadgets that are supposed to be
> > used to teach kids how to program and build embedded controllers for
> > what-have-you.  Clearly the kid knows what the old man likes.  Yes, 
it
> > is a time suck.
> 
> I thought about playing with an Arduino awhile back as something to
> attach to a Linux box to control random stuff. Never go past the
> thinking about part. I'm ready to pull the trigger on that or a
> raspberry pi now, though.

Arduino is better if you are interested in lower-level embedded 
development.  I use it for lots of things where I want to create a 
firmware thing from the ground up (with a community full of free source 
code to do all sorts of things and a gui dev environment that is 
amazingly simple).  Arduino uses an Atmega169 (or 328 for twice the 
memory) and is akin to the kind of microcontroller found in refrigerators 
and Smart Thermostats.

RaspPi is really a tiny Linux system.  It also has a bunch of GPIO pins 
that you can connect some cool peripherals up to, and do many of the 
things you can use an Arduino for, but it's real power is in how *many* 
things it can do using full Linux, USB, NIC, etc...  It's more like a 
smart phone than a fridge.


> On 2015-02-16 10:11, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
> > lol, I have been doing that very thing
> > 
> > Actually, I've been using it for vulnerability research on embedded
> > platforms.  Very handy little suckers.
> 
> Good to see you are all still here. I got pretty burned out for a 
while,
> but I think I'm starting to come up for air again.

I have to admit to having checked the list once every 6-8months for a 
while.  So focused on $DAYJOB.  About 8 years ago I chose Kubuntu and 
have had very few questions about Linux.  I limited my tinkering in the 
OS to focus on compiled binaries, to see how they worked.  I needed Linux 
to *just work* and for the most part, it's gone that way.  Far better 
than my luck with Windows.  Mac has been ok, but I still don't like it 
much.  It is not optimized for the way I work.  I'm a die-hard KDE/Linux 
boy.  The way it works is how my brain works.

Great to hear from you again, friends.

Matt