I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
If you want a good finder for still work, you’re much better off with an SLR such as the Nikon F3. The M3 is a stunning camera but it’s usability is very low for anything but some casual stuff. People like them for the prestige.
Anything Nikon from the F3 onwards, F4's seem to be a tad cheaper, is a good choice. Great cameras, hell the F4 was revolutionary at its time, and they work with all F-mount lenses. As do all Nikon DSLRs, and those lenses, especially some manual focus ones, are quite cheap despite being optically marvelous.
Same goes for Canon, but there lens compatability for older models is more limited. Added added benefit: The F4 works with G-versionen lenses, if memory works well, and those work great with the z-mount lenses using the adaptor. Additional added benefit: Fujifilm cameras work great with f-mount and an adapter as well.
That loses the flange focal distance advantage. SLRs are great for making professional photographs but they are quite bulky. Leica M rangefinders are nice and compact with some very small, yet fast, lenses.
I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented...
Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.
As an electronic engineer of 10 years, one of the most useful things in my lab is blue tac[1]. It's so useful and versatile as a third hand for soldering or keep things from moving around attached to cables etc.
I tried one of those and was sorely disappointed, at least the model I had the arms were way too flimsy.
It's super easy to build one that is better, Lowe's sells wire by the foot. Get either 12 or 10 AWG wire, crimp alligator clips on it, and attach the other end to a piece of plywood with 2 screws, looping the wire first around one then the other for stability. This works way better, and if you find the arms are either too flimsy or not sturdy enough it's super easy to modify. I attached mine with machine screws and have 14awg and 10awg arms that I swap between depending on how heavy the thing I'm holding is. Eventually the copper wire will work harden and break, but I haven't had an arm snap in the 6 years I've been using this. Probably would cost 15 bucks total and the only tool you need to build it is a drill (assuming you have electronics tools already).
They can be useful but often the cheap ones are not that good / fall apart. You can also just build your own with heavier wire like used in home wiring and some quality crocodile clips. Attach to a heavy base.
I also recommend the blue tack on top of the crocodile clip positioners.
ESP32 is my go to MCU to use now. Their tooling and libraries are so far ahead of the competition especially when you factor in the choice of CLI or VS Code - an actually good IDE. ESP-IDF is so reliable and easy to use I don’t feel the need to JTAG/SWD debug anymore…
I use it at work, and while it’s quite good, I find some of the ESP libraries on top of FreeRTOS to actually be a step backwards. As soon as esp adds their event loop, you’re pushed towards using that architecture, and while I’ve found that good for single use devices, for devices that are doing multiple things at the same time, fitting in memory has been a chore.
I also would love some higher performance networking with zero copy, most of the interface boundaries in the esp code involve a memory copy.
Yes its easy to use but a bit wasteful. I suspect that the innovative stuff will come from the Rust side of things, with zero copy, shared stack etc. They are actively funding efforts here [0]. The RTIC [1] project looks really neat, but only supports Cortex-M afaik.
I’m really really pumped about the rust stack, for two big reasons.
1. The innovation and performance you’re talking about.
2. Hiring. We’re going to be able to be on a flashy language, doing something cool which isn’t always the case with embedded. We’ve had a hell of a time getting candidates in that could write low level code competently. Rust should make that easier and hopefully using it will make us more attractive to the small pool of devs we’re courting.
My impression is that a certain kind of people find the challenges of embedded work attractive, but leave it sooner or later since the pay is not competitive with generic (but more boring) webdev. I guess this is due to the nature of thin margins in manufacturing hardware?
I did a bit of RTIC and can confirm it's pretty pleasurable to work with. It's sort of almost-RTOS, just enough to get some concurrency going without going full-on OS. It also cleverly uses unused ARM interrupts to act as sorta hardware accelerated context switches
I think others have covered it in other posts but I’d just like to add that this protocol is only for negotiation, everything continues in the native protocol afterwards.
Looks awesome and for sure will be the future. Most ECAD software has a circuit 'library' function you can design something once and use it many times so it's not completely fair to claim that's something really novel.
You are correct that most EDA platforms have a notion of a library but in the domain of PCB design, those libraries are usually limited to components (symbols/footprints). And there is very little verification that is done upon reuse. That's where we differ: design verification upon reuse with the judicious use of component properties written in the same code as the component itself. And reuse is now just copying text, and not having to worry about tool version compatibility for instance.
It doesn't. Just because it shares some syntax with C does not make it 'want to be procedural'. I think that comes from the programmers bias from first learning a procedural language.
I learnt C then Verilog, I am fluent in Verilog. The mindset for designing digital logic is completely different to programming computers, it literally is a completely different skill. The problem is, people think just because they can type a (procedural) programming language they can program anything that is programmed with a code which is where peoples initial distaste for Verilog and VHDL comes from. When you learn how to do it, I think designing logic is refreshing compared to writing software, there's so much baggage with software.
I do totally agree with the comment, and even upvoted it, but in some sense an HDL does 'want to be procedural'. For example:
Procedure to make brick wall:
For brick in wheel-barrow do
To brick, apply mortar, place it, pound it with trowel
(Apologies to all masons. I think you can tell my training is electrical engineering.)
I've thought for some time that the main problem with Verilog is that it looks really close, visually, to C and that gives people the wrong impression.
Things are happening simultaneously in time and space. The ripples are happening while the skips are happening. The skips go stable because the ripple goes stable or the carry will skip so the ripple has "extra time" to go stable.
This is the simplest add faster than naive ripple carry. Note that it has no clocks. This is a purely combinatoric problem. And most "digital designers" will get it wrong.
Hardware design is NOT software design. Good digital designers are always thinking about how to interleave things in time and space like this.
