Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   palimpsest environments of any complexity
Sunday, July 19 2009
As technologies go, computer tech is perhaps the most maddening. The problem is that it is changing so quickly that palimpsest environments of any complexity are inherently unstable. For example, while most new computers are no longer shipped with simple serial ports, microcontroller development (even on new microcontrollers) is difficult without serial ports. So, on my main computer (which was shipped with a simple serial port that has proved unreliable), I've been forced to depend on USB-to-serial-port adapters, devices whose self-configuring behaviors throw unwanted randomness into a test environment. You can never predict what COM port they'll end up being, and this means you have to keep editing your script libraries and wondering if you're really acting through the correct port.
Similar complexity issues seem to haunt the ever-expanding world of Arduino microcontrollers. In the old days (circa 2006), the Arduino was a single kind of board hosting a single type of controller, the Atmega8. There was no complexity and everything just worked. But now there are many kinds of boards and three or four kinds of controllers. Running on these controllers are dozens of different bootloaders (required so the microcontroller can easily be reprogrammed over a simple serial connection), and to get those bootloaders to work requires the correct setting of things called "fuses" on the processors. But nobody seems to know for sure what those fuse setting should be on some processors. The result is complete chaos. I can successfully burn a bootloader on an 8K Atmega8 with a homemade parallel-port programmer, but to burn the bootloader on a 16K Atmega168, I have to use a serial ISP programmer. And so far (and today I tried lots of different techniques) I've been unsuccessful at burning a working bootloader on a 32K Atmega328. That's a shame, because I have some features I want to add to my solar sufficiency controller that will require the extra space. Already a 16K Arduino has the necessary intelligence to act as something of a remote probe, one that can be queried and told to do things, but with 32K it'll be like commanding an ultra-responsive Martian Rover.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090719

feedback
previous | next