Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
yep he recommended to the arduino package maintainer that the actual core parts not be glommed together with a runtime and IDE and everything else.
Well, I reacted badly to the Java UI (because it was ludicrously broken under tiling window managers --
ohh that's right. you use xmonad. written in 1200 lines of haskell if i recall. fricking awesome and scary at the same time :)
the menu required you to click the screen elsewhere to get anywhere, and my screen wasn't wide enough to click anything on the sub-menus ;-) ), and noticed that it was actually possible to use a Makefile, and that there were several Makefiles in circulation, so chose what looked to be the most maintained one, and suggested that the author pick up the nice features in the other ones, and then stuck that together as the arduino-core package.
cool!
yyyeah... have you noticed btw that the way they do "finding of libraries" is... to indiscriminately extend make's "VPATH". all and any headers, object files, modules, executables... *all* of those are searched for in *every single one* of the paths.
if you happen to have the same filename somewhere anywhere in those paths, you're hosed.
it's a total global namespace .... nightmare. nnnngh! whyyyy do they doo thiiiiis!
As it happens, I fired up my arduino for the first time since doing the arduino-core uploads last week -- My 5 year old daughter and I are knocking up something to drive some LEDs and a motor in order to make her IKEA kitchen have a working turntable in the microwave, and a blue LED to simulate water coming out of the tap, etc.
ha, cool! yeah i bought something called a "Sparki" robot for me and lilyana to play with. which was for about... 2 days. the GUI on that however i have to say is extremely cool. it's block-based like a jigsaw, and it auto-generates actual code which you can then look at to see if it does what you expected.
Sounds somewhat like scratch.
Also in the same vein is the thing from microsoft: 'makecode', that the Love To Code folk at chibitronics are using in conjunction with the Chibi Chip:
https://makecode.chibitronics.com/
makecode also supports other microcontrollers boards, it seems:
The chibi chip is one of Bunnie's projects, for making it easy to do clever stuff with circuits made out of sticky copper tape and stick-on LEDs and sensors -- I'm awaiting one in the post, having found a UK based seller last week:
https://chibitronics.com/shop/love-to-code-chibi-chip-cable/
Bunnie gave a nice talk about it at CCC last year:
https://archive.org/details/media.ccc.de-33c3-7975-making_technology_inclusi...
(for which I happened to be on Main Camera, in the video team filming it)
I particularly like his Sauerkraut analogy about always getting the same outcome if you start with the same ingredients.
Cheers, Phil.