markb139

8 ms·

1.
by markb139 23d ago
Agree. Transistors really are worth learning about to any level - its certainly possible to get lost in the physics. I’d find some high level tutorials online that maybe use one of the free circuit simulator tools. falstad.com/circuit&
2.
by markb139 24d ago
As a 17 y.o (way back in the last century) I didn’t need to be advised to learn about transistors. I just had a thirst for the knowledge. I would encourage everyone to learn something about transistors. They are one of mankind’s most useful
3.
by markb139 2mo ago
Way back in time (1980s) I worked in the broadcast tv industry. We used to used digital still stores. A single frame of PAL took up 1MB of RAM. The machines had 2MB fitted. The board had a hardware cross fade function implemented in discre
4.
by markb139 2mo ago
Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much w
5.
by markb139 3mo ago
My best is 980W - for 1 second
6.
by markb139 4mo ago
I’m a leftie and I don’t think I learnt it. My mother said as a very young child she noticed I’d mainly used my left hand to take things - probably food :) These days the only real problem for me is scissors, especially the ones with moulde
7.
by markb139 4mo ago
I’m a leftie from a 50% leftie family. Apparently I showed my left handedness as a baby when grasping for things and hardly used my right hand. My mother was also a leftie, but in her generation she was forced to write with her right hand.
8.
by markb139 4mo ago
I think this was also a “look what we can do at short notice” kind of exercise. Just in case a country was thinking of maybe trying to take over another set of islands in the south Atlantic
9.
by markb139 4mo ago
Why use any high level language at all if AI is writing the software. The high level languages seem mostly about humans not being able to handle complexity. Not an issue for an automated bot.
10.
by markb139 6mo ago
I’ve recently built a disassembler and emulator using Claude to help reverse engineer a 90’s ECU based on an Intel embedded cpu. It was quite impressive to watch when Claude started to use the emulator to help understand how bits of the cod
11.
by markb139 7mo ago
It seems to be perfectly happy to run on virtual box with a Debian install. The host pc is running a local model. I’m quite impressed with what it’s capable of.
12.
by markb139 7mo ago
I’ve got the solar version. It runs a long time between charges. Maybe I haven’t done enough tracked exercise recently
13.
by markb139 7mo ago
I used to think photography was an expensive hobby until my wife got back into the horse world.
14.
by markb139 8mo ago
Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.
15.
by markb139 8mo ago
I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engine
16.
by markb139 9mo ago
“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool” Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the
17.
by markb139 10mo ago
I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the context switching between ARM mode and Jazelle mode. Turned out
18.
by markb139 1y ago
I’ve tried 2 AI tools recently. Neither could produce the correct code to calculate the CPU temperature on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. The code worked, looked ok and even produced reasonable looking results - until I put a finger on the chip and
19.
by markb139 1y ago
I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the values.
20.
by markb139 1y ago
Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350. If it doesn’t know that, then what else doesn’t it know?
21.
by markb139 1y ago
37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60. My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really badly at school. I just learnt at my own pace and eventually
22.
by markb139 1y ago
It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years. I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020. I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no
23.
by markb139 1y ago
I’ve now retired from professional programming and I’m now in hobby mode. I learn nothing from reading AI generated code. I might as well read the stack overflow questions myself and learn.
24.
by markb139 1y ago
The code looked fine. And I don’t think my finger is colder than the chip - I’m not the iceman. The error is the analog value read by the ADC gets lower as the temperature rises.
25.
by markb139 1y ago
I tried code gen for the first time recently. The generated code look great, was commented and ran perfectly. The results were completely wrong. The code was to calculate the cpu temperature from the Raspberry Pi RP2350 in python. The ini
26.
by markb139 1y ago
30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)
27.
by markb139 2y ago
Unless it reaches escape velocity (ie its never coming back) then it will always comeback to where it started from. The object is under the same gravitaional influences as the Earth As others have pointed out, there is a rocket motor to put
28.
by markb139 2y ago
I think Newton is on the phone... Once the accelerating force is removed the object will go into an orbit that includes the point at which the force stops. This however is Earth
29.
by markb139 2y ago
From my experience on the Raspberry Pi rp2040, adding C code to a micropython build is very straightforward
30.
by markb139 2y ago
You think you're old? I was part of the team at the other end of that stack building and debugging the Java runtime for the Nokia Symbian phones :)

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