Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine? 327
MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"
Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Informative)
A fantastic hobbyist type magazine. Our community college has a student subscription for it, definitely worth it. Edited by Steve Circia, name should ring a bell!!
Make (Score:5, Informative)
From O'Reilly is about the only one which I can think of.
Make Magazine (Score:3, Informative)
Make magazine is a wonderful DIY with electronics projects etc.
I like this one... (Score:5, Informative)
Try looking at http://www.nutsvolts.com/. It has electronic and some programming at very low level.
Maximum PC (Score:4, Informative)
If you are intent on bit banging... (Score:3, Informative)
If you are intent on bit banging... the available options these days are pretty much limited to microcontrollers, unless you want to end up in huge projects or small modifications on huge projects.
Most of what you can do with these tends to be robotics projects, since there aren't a lot of 8-bit general purpose computers available out there any more.
There are a lot of web sites that provide small source code for special purpose robotics projects which you could apply much in the same way as typing in BASIC games from Compute! or Byte magazine, and then playing with them.
If your intent is to provide a project for a kid, you could do a lot worse than going some place like Weird Stuff, buying up a handful of Compute! magazines and a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive, and a box of 10 floppies. There are plenty of analog TV's out there still to use a monitors which are otherwise sitting unloved in peoples garages.
-- Terry
Pragmatic Programming is another great option (Score:3, Informative)
Arduino (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I prefer working with ATmega's directly rather than with Arduino, but ... if you want to futz around and LEARN, Arduino is a good place for it. Lots of tutorials and others willing to help. Lots of neat plugin boards for sensors IO. Lots of choices of example software from FreeRTOS to VGA output on a pin (both of those aren't designed for the arduino framework, but porting them should be rather trivial once you get to the point where you would consider porting them.
If you're using Windows, I'd suggest just using the AVRstudio from Atmel and WinAVR (GCC for AVR chips if you want to use C/C++ instead of just ASM). You can start with the Arduino development environment and move up later. Its free. The Arduino environment is really just a replacement for your main() with a while(1) loop on the standard AVR toolchain anyway
Arduino has lots of examples and information, but from a debugging standpoint, its the worst there is.
AVR Studio from Atmel has a nearly perfect simulator, and if you use something like HAPSIM you can simulate other hardware as well, such as serial ports, buttons, leds and a specific LCD.
If someone would add some decent debugging abilities to Arduino it'd be a useful development environment for me, but debugging through the simulator might be a little overwhelming for a newbie I guess.
I used to roll my own boards for ATmegas, now I just use Arduino boards, price is more than the processor, but cheaper than rolling the whole board yourself unless you do it in numbers, the Arduino hardware is the best way to go if you're talking quanities less than 10 for sure, probably cheaper all the way up to the 100s if you're hand assembling.
Make and Some 2600 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Arduino - Links help (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.arduino.cc/ [arduino.cc]
Nut's and Volt's (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bytes! Gazette (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Informative)
Yep that was number one on my list. You might want to add Nuts and Volts as well. :(
Oh and the entire internet for software.
I really miss Byte
Oh and this as well http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/ [chaosmanorreviews.com]
Re:The Internet is this magazine. (Score:1, Informative)
Virtually every issue from the 1980s is a gem.
It did exist in the mid to late 1970's too. Every issue from the 70's was just a gem as well. Articles, programs, algorithm discussions, electronics, reviews on things like the late 70's computers from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Cromemco, etc. and the software for them. Great stuff back then.
Manufacturer websites (Score:5, Informative)
I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line-by-line, and figuring out how sound, graphics and input devices worked along the way.
They only existed in the 80s because the device manufacturers had no way to distribute large multi page paper documents for free. Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.
Nowadays, if you want to learn how to make sound, or program a LCD, or run a A/D converter, you just download the appnotes from the manufacturers website, typically you get a PDF explaining in great detail how it works, schematics, and example code to get you started out. Some manufacturers go further and sell demoboards for a really modest (probably subsidized) fees.
Either the manufacturer's appnotes are so simple and clear that a "D" student could figure it out, or they go out of business and are replaced by a manufacturer with better tech writers. The quality level is generally excellent.
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Informative)
c't (.de) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely correct. I rarely post or reply here, but I lunged at this one. Very gratifying to see you beat me to it.
To give you an idea, the latest issue of this magazine includes a quaternion-based combined accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles-- and it's pretty good. There's also a good summary of cool new and emerging parts, and fairly often some high-profile design contests that are absolutely accessible to hobbyists.
And yes, you'll occasionally see source code listings. Though the website is used thoroughly as well.
I write embedded software for a living, and let me tell you, if you want to get back to that 1980s feel of knocking out your own computer just because you can, then hacking around to see what you can pull off with it, modern microcontrollers are awesome, and they are cheap, cheap, cheap. Add to that the cheap fab 'n' slab shops that not just print PCBs but will populate them with your parts, and you're off and running even if your soldering dexterity sucks.
Also, I would say that "Make" has its place, and that is getting people to be creative comfortably within their skill space. The long term strategic goal for that magazine is probably as an easy entry point to get people back into a mindset where they realize that they can, in fact, build things themselves. I consider that goal strategically important for the global economy, as well as the Bright Shiny Future.
But "Circuit Cellar" ("Circuit Cellar Ink" if you want to go back a bit) is an excellent thing to read and hack around with. Sometimes just seeing what other people have managed to pull off is half the fun. Much of that stuff finds its way into real-world applications, just like "Byte" and "Dr. Dobb's Journal" once trained an armada of people who changed the world (thank you, Michael Abrash).
Best wishes and happy hacking,
Matt Heck
Senior Software Engineer, ECast, Inc.
Former Director of Special Projects, TechShop, LLC
Don't dismiss microcontrollers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If you are intent on bit banging... (Score:3, Informative)
I picked-up a lot of knowledge from here: http://www.avsforum.com/ [avsforum.com]
And here which describes NTSC in great detail: http://www.videointerchange.com/pal_secam_conversions.htm [videointerchange.com]
And: http://nfggames.com/games/ntsc/colourresx.shtm [nfggames.com]
http://www.videouniversity.com/articles/video-recording-formats [videouniversity.com]
Re:It's called "The Internet" (Score:5, Informative)
You must be very young. I can remember when even Computer Shopper had some decent technical articles. I learned a lot from it.
I can also remember when there were multiple magazines about anything technical. From computers to hotrodding you could find a lot of very technical how-to projects that took months for the magazine to complete. Every aspect of the project was gone over in great detail, unlike the vast majority of what you find on the internet today that is very, very cursory information. Back in the day a good article on hotrodding would tell you how to cc and modify the cylinder head combustion chambers to provide even power from all cylinders in your engine, or tell you how to completely rebuild and strengthen the transmission or rear differential in your car, or how to build drive train from beginning to end to get the most performance and longevity out of it. The last type of article would teach you to understand cam lobe technology and how it affects the power band of your engine, how to match heads and intake manifold, to the cam. How to match compression ratio to all of that, and then how to match your clutch, transmission, and rear end to the engine. The amount of knowledge those magazines made available was incredible.
The old computer magazines were just as thorough in their approach to computing as the good hotrod magazines were to hotrodding. Even Radio Shack had a decent reputation for technical projects. Now they're nothing interesting at all. Thirty years ago you could buy almost anything you could think of in electronic components from them. They'd even sell you a build-from-scratch computer kit. Not the greatest computer in the world even for that time, but a great learning project. Nothing like it even exists today.
Re:Arduino (Score:4, Informative)
BBB [moderndevice.com] is much cheaper then the official arduino at any quantity if you don't need the USB after programming or shield compatibility. Same for the arduino pro [sparkfun.com], which is more expensive, but has shield compatibility and requires no assembly.
Seeeduino [seeedstudio.com] is slightly cheaper then the official version and has some cool hardware features missing from the original.
Your first one should probably still be the official arduino board, however. If you need a large quantity, you can save a bundle with the BBB or RBBB.
Re:Make Magazine (Score:3, Informative)
So, in other words, entering an already-created industry and blowing away the competition for years and years and years, with tons of so-called "killers" falling by the wayside year after year?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:1, Informative)
The problem with 2600 is that they started having a significant lack of articles written by technically competent people. As a result, the articles they did have were on lame things criminals would enjoy like cross site scripting exploits and things script kiddies use today.
And the letters to the editor devolved until most were children asking the editor if it was "cool" for them to do some stupid prank in their computer lab at school, instead of people sharing real discoveries they had made.
I enjoyed the magazine back in the late 90s when they ran articles on phone phreaking, building magstripe readers, analyzing bank and phone cards, and developing x86 virii that were polymorphic or had "stealth" HD access. It was all stuff you could really go out and do, or build, or hack.
Most of those areas of exploration are dead or considerably different now, but there's no reason they couldn't have shifted their focus to hacking of consumer gear like routers, cable boxes, satellite cards, cellphones, etc. They didn't, and I stopped my subscription when I realized the only part of 2600 I still enjoyed were the payphone photos.
Maybe today, things have changed enough that the 2600 of old can't exist. Maybe with all the suing and litigation they couldn't get away with discussing how to read secured microcontrollers in ATMs without getting in trouble. If that's the case, I can see why they shifted away from technical articles that described things in any significant and meaningful detail.
2600 was fun while it lasted. I don't think there will ever be anything like it, which is sad when you consider 2600 is still in print.
Silicon Chip (Score:2, Informative)
I used to enjoy reading Silicon Chip years ago
just did a quick search and it appears they're still around. Online version of the magazine now as well!
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/ [siliconchip.com.au]
I take exception to that... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Make (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Internet is this magazine. (Score:3, Informative)
Another one:
http://www.phrack.org/ [phrack.org]