Feels like when I was a teenager, the electronics kids (I wasn’t one) were mainly building things with 555 timer and op-amp ICs as the most complex components. When did the microcontroller revolution start? With what chips/boards?
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I recall using a raw machine code based microcontroller in an undergrad class in 1995 (keying in register values and looking up opcodes). Was that the norm then? I used a Stamp2 with pbasic circa 2006. I think Arduino happened right after.
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When did cheap C-flavored microcontroller boards first appear? Was Arduino the first one? How much did an Arduino equivalent boards cost in the 90s and aughts? I remember an Atmel board that was around $300 in 2006.
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It feels like everybody was so focused on the minicomputer-PC-laptop-mobile story we kinda didn’t notice an equally radical evolution in cheap embedded microcontrollers and single-board computers. Today’s mcs and SBCs are as far beyond 1975 ones as iPhones are from minicomputers.
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Kinda ridiculous how $15 boards can run C code now and $30 boards can boot Linux.
It just hit me that the “waste microcontrollers” mindset is new and I don’t have it. Nobody bothers with clever 555 circuits and stuff. Do it in software and use GPIO pins on simpler circuits.
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Simple circuits + cheap microcontrollers beats complex circuits and many single-function chips?
Feels like there should be a paper on this. “The unreasonable effectiveness of Arduinos.”
I’d read that avidly.
Like that big data paper by Norvig etc.
static.googleusercontent.com/media/research
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Or maybe it’s like the Ruby/Python frameworks moment when interpreted languages overtook Java for web. Also circa 2007 I think. There was PHP and ASP and cold fusion before that but Java was the “serious” way.
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I was around uni in the early 2010s and grouchy lab instructors were constantly changing rules to make the kids do things correctly with nontrivial circuits, instead of using an Arduino for literally everything
I think they've given up now, outside specific electronics courses
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Wait till you discover the $3 ESP32 with BLE and WiFi that can be programmed with C, CircuitPython or Arduino.
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There’s definitely a community of people still making wild stuff with analog circuits, especially in the synthesizer community!
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