On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:38 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
 ok, so tell me - i take it you have time on your hands: what can you
do for this project that's worth the cost of one of these
micro-desktop boards and a CPU Card?

I'll be honest: I have no idea. I did put up that R-2R ladder thing, but that's about the extent of what I can do with electronics right now. I'm a real noob there. Programming for me is limited to QuickBASIC (specifically MS QuickBASIC PDS 7.1 or /very/ similar). I've tried three times to learn C++ and it went rather poorly (I'm being kind) all three times. Needless to say, that's basically useless as well unless you want to run FreeDOS on these cards for something (I don't think so!). I could probably port over to QB64 if I wanted to muck with that, but it'd be a real PITA for not much gain.

I'm something of an artist, but I'm much better with pencil/pen and paper than with computer graphics so I probably can't even do advertising stuff. Right now I don't even have computer graphics capability -- a couple months ago I moved to Linux full time, and I need to install WINE to get my software (CorelDRAW X3, a gift from my father) to run in Puppy (my distro of choice) -- and I have not installed WINE yet. (Once I do, making CorelDRAW actually work will take some finagling.) I took a drafting course in high school (ten years ago) and somewhere I have a book (if I haven't gotten rid of it) on drafting, but I'm allergic to using multiple pencils (meaning all lines are the same width) and I have a hard time with rulers (they move on me, lol!). I'm also not that hot at thinking in 3D... I'm positively pathetic at shading (when I'm not doing drafting) and I simply cannot wrap my head around eg 3D modeling (I tried Sketchup... Sketchup and I sort of came to a mutual understanding that things were not going to work out, and we parted ways). I can do orthos, and I can usually avoid designing something that's too Escher-esque to work in Euclidean space, but I do have my moments. Also I'm totally worthless drawing organic figures. Flowers and people are very hard for me to draw for some reason...

*phew* that ended up being a little longer than I thought it would. Hopefully there's something in there that's useful.