The Simple Electronics Podcast - 086 - Paul's Projects

This week on The Simple Electronics Podcast, I have a seat with Paul from Paul's Projects and Smart Bee Designs!
This episode is brought to you by PCBWay! get 5 PCBs (or more) for 5$ USD plus S/H
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Check out his links:
/ @paulprice
smartbeedesigns.com/
www.devboarddb.com/
/ smartbeedesigns
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[@patchvonbraun]

My first PCBs were done in my kitchen, using photo-resist boards and a lot of swearing. Such an amazing change from those days of the 1980s. There used to be two PCB houses in the Ottawa area--Megadawn in Carleton Place, and a company I worked for, Gandalf Data Limited, had their own "captive" PCB facility that also did contract work for other companies. Things are so very different now. Open Source design tools, and cheap small-run PCB services has completely changed the way hobbyists do things. Back around 1978 or so, I *hand wired* an 8080-based small computer system. On 2.54mm perfboard and hand-soldered every single connection. That lead to a lot of burned fingers :)

[@AnotherMaker]

That's funny. As you were talking about the board DB project, I was thinking that was an ideal userspice project.

[@frankowalker4662]

I agree with you about the documentation, that's why I quit messing with Arduino and such.

[@patchvonbraun]

I have a PCB on the WAY from PCBWAY right now, as a matter of fact :)

[@patchvonbraun]

The basic "problem" with an all-GUI environment, is that it's close to impossible to "capture" every single procedural "thing" you might want to do with your computer into a nice, tidy pointy-clicky-mousey thing. Humans are good at language, so a CLI makes a lot of sense for many many things that aren't, strictly-speaking, "programming", but rather "programming adjacent". Linux is Unix, and Unix was developed LONG before there were GUI subsystems, or even displays capable of supporting them, let alone the necessary CPU horsepower. But here's an interesting fact. The first widely-distributed GUI systems that were in use out there? Unix-based (and then Linux, of course). The Windows/Mac world's attitude towards the kinds of tasks you might want to accomplish in the CLI is "you shouldn't ever want to do that". Which, as you might imagine, kinda gets my hackles up. Unix (and by extension, Linux) did a LOT of things long before Windows did those things--useful GUIs, dynamic and shareable libraries, a rich authorization and file protection scheme, loadable kernel modules, a useful hierarchical filesystem (which, BTW, Windows still doesn't really have), etc, etc. Windows copied many of these things, both from Unix variants, and others OS (like VMS). But very-often, quite badly, and sometimes better. Learning the CLI, and shell-scripting is an incredibly useful skill, IMHO.