Jagossel wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Those were great kits. Very educational and easy to work with, no soldering required. I only had a 10 in one, but even that had some interesting projec
Man, they were loads of fun and it was one of the few toys that I would play with (along with Legos and a computer) very frequently. Like I
said, I went to look it up one day and saw that they are now over
US$95, but the one kit that I saw that comes with a microcontroller is like about US$50. I would like to pick it up and see if I can do something with it, but I wouldn't know what to do with a curcuit and a microcontroller.
From memory, the bigger kits weren't cheap back then either. Yes, microcontrollers should be pretty standard fare nowadays, ideally something like an Arduino.
When I watch a lot of the Ben Heck shows, it seems like electronic engineering is starting to have a lot of programming involved. It
really seems like software is starting to take over our daily lives.
:)
Has been for some time. I like the change. Sure, it means learning some programming, though I find microcontroller programming _much_ easier than general programming, because you're working on bare metal in a fairly deterministic way, rather than trying to work in cooperation with some OS and whatever else is on the system. 10 years ago, I wrote a sophisticated multiport simplex/duplex radio link controller, with a "smart VOX" (which worked in conjunction with an external DSP noise reduction unit). The code was written in assembler on a PIC16F84, only a couple hundred lines in total. It could handle 5 radio ports (limited by available I/O pins on the PIC), in any combination of simplex or duplex, and modes - FM with hardware squelch, FM with VOX, SSB "smart VOX" that minimised false triggering.
In the field, this unit was extremely successful. I used it to likk a 70cm FM frequency, 2m SSB frequency and PC with Echolink together. The combination of DSP audio processing and smart squelch made the SSB users sound more like FM users, provided they tuned to the exact frequency the link was running on. I frequently heard reports from Echolink users, amazed they were talking to someone on SSB. :)
The availability of microcontrollers allows one to do things easily, which would be tedious at best, to do in hardware.
Speaking as a developer, of course. <grin>
:-)
... My computer has EMS... Won't you help?
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