March 5th, 2020 at 12:37 AM
The bot does this to everyone. I thought I had fixed it to be less intrusive. We're going to disable it soon.
Regarding parallax, that's more or less my thoughts exactly. I've long wanted to grab a Zilog Z80 and plug away with it. It's pretty powerful if you just need a basic microcontroller for some simple stuff on a hardware board. (My job actually uses a light switch board that is powered by a zilog Z80. It's an old building so this is no surprise. I'll have to upload a picture of its circuit board one of these days.)
Microcontrollers make it so much more accessible, however. You don't have to worry about setting up clock chips, ram chips, rom, etc. The pin-outs for the microprocessor itself are all handled by the Basic Stamp or the Arduino, and the interface that you see is altogether much simpler and easy to use.
That said, it takes the fun out of it a little. I'm designing a little 8 bit CPU in verilog as a side project, and the low-level details can be fun, until you have to wire it all together on a physical board.
Regarding parallax, that's more or less my thoughts exactly. I've long wanted to grab a Zilog Z80 and plug away with it. It's pretty powerful if you just need a basic microcontroller for some simple stuff on a hardware board. (My job actually uses a light switch board that is powered by a zilog Z80. It's an old building so this is no surprise. I'll have to upload a picture of its circuit board one of these days.)
Microcontrollers make it so much more accessible, however. You don't have to worry about setting up clock chips, ram chips, rom, etc. The pin-outs for the microprocessor itself are all handled by the Basic Stamp or the Arduino, and the interface that you see is altogether much simpler and easy to use.
That said, it takes the fun out of it a little. I'm designing a little 8 bit CPU in verilog as a side project, and the low-level details can be fun, until you have to wire it all together on a physical board.
