QUESTION [on Facebook]:
What did people do before Arduinos?
I assume projects were trial and error. Or others built their own microcontrollers.
BACKGROUND:
My answer got some likes.-I'm an absolute beginner to Arduino but not a total newbie to hobby electronics .
-In my younger days I remember having a large bread board plugged in the wall and I put in my different components. My projects worked or didn't.
-I assume Arduino is able to test projects and preprogrammed to control projects.
Arduino raised the bar on integrated development environments for low end single chip microcomputers. It's platform agnostic and still manages to deliver a working tool chain. Install software package, launch and go. No fiddling around with jtag or prom burners or writing your own loader any more. No more paying the chip vendor $Ks for his proprietary tool chain. Made the tech way more accessible.
"What did people do before?" In 1979 and 80 I built a "system" around a Zilog Z-80 CPU. Memory and serial ports were external to the CPU. I had a Z-80 assembler running on a Heath/Zenith H-89 computer connected to a Data-IO prom burner, at my job. The development cycle was erase the prom (with an intense ultraviolet lamp), compile, burn the new code into the prom, take the prom home, plug it in the system, hit reset and watch. The prom code included a simple debugger so you could modify memory and store and retrieve code from a cassette tape. The digital stuff was overly complicated due to a decision to be S-100 Bus compatible, but it worked. The most fun part was the analog modem for 1200 bit per second tape storage. Phase locked loops are magical critters. The S-100 bus sucked, even when it was introduced.
The memory board from that project is in the March and April 1983 BYTE magazine. My advice to kids in school, do something besides your schoolwork, that's visible in the world. Having a technical publication on my resume opened doors for me when I was "fresh out." It didn't matter how terrible the publication was. It shows you're looking for a career, not just a job. Design a thing, or fix bugs in an open source product.
Added in reply,
Three years later I was working at Motorola and I was asked to redesign some garage shop's Z-80 based single board computer. (To make it reliable.) Without that S-100 nonsense, I got all the clock and DRAM strobe timing and decoding into two 20-pin PLDs. Lowered his chip count and power consumption, and beat all his timing margins. A very satisfying design, fully synchronous. And they cancelled the program. No point, after the IBM PC was announced.
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