in reply to Re^2: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?
in thread Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?

Sure ease-wise yes I agree with you but who does it?

From personal statistics/experience: I still have to see anyone of the thousands of smartphone users I see everyday to have a DIY extension board with ADC interfacing with an analogue camera or controlling their pet robot or as a TV remote control. I see a lot of apps doing these using what sensors and ports the smartphone already provides, e.g. interfacing phone to bicycle speed and location.I have not seen yet a DIY one. Perhaps I am living in a non-nerdy neighbourhood ;)

Gone is the time of soldering more memory to computers or making a joystick or a Light_pen (remember that?)

Edit: forgot the speech synthesizer

  • Comment on Re^3: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?

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Re^4: Is Perl on the Raspberry Pi worth it?
by marto (Cardinal) on Jun 19, 2019 at 08:34 UTC

    I actually had one of these, maybe 1986? It was off the shelf, but then I was about 7 years old at the time. In terms of "but who does it", there are many people cutting their teeth on physical computing, Arduino (or compatible) or Rpi with GPIO, either at home using the amazing resources now available online, or in code clubs, hackerspaces and coder dojos or alike, all around the world. An arduino clone can be picked up for less than $2 US, and the toolchain is very user friendly.

[reply]

      It certainly looks like all the raw materials are in-place and the cooking temperature just right, so maybe a revolution is looming. But somehow I can't see it cooking like the smartphone revolution did.

      Perhaps we omitted one factor in our analysis: this revolution has the potential to emancipate and not to enslave. Being totally bottom-up, terms like "jailbreak" and "appstore" will become meaningless and rightly so.

      Encapsulation breaking up is bad news for anyone out there watching. It's different to have a smartphone prepare a nice report on user's activity and sent to big sister compared to each chip on an arduino doing that separately. Can't wait to see a backdoor in a resistor, or a capacitor phoning-home - when they appear it will be the end for the NSA. Because harvesting can be equally easy but aggregating information, getting the bigger picture out will be much more difficult (orders of magnitude) in this revolution.

      And so it will never happen, I say, except in the fringe/margin/background/underground. But I am all for it and I am happy to see more Pi(+Perl) activity.

[reply]

        We've gone from a statement "The old art of combining electronics+programming is scarce today IMO", then "Sure ease-wise yes I agree with you but who does it?" to "Somehow I can't see it cooking like the smartphone revolution did.". I don't understand why you are making this comparison, or what expectations you have. Why expect one thing to be as popular as something so fundamentally different? People can and are building their own phones, open source phones exist, open source SIP phones exist. The "smartphone revolution" was driven by large companies who want to make money by selling you a product, in some cases getting a cut for the use, while simultaneously making money out of your data and behaviours. Why you would expect the be able to compare learning how to do something (programming/electronics/building your own stuff) with simply being a consumer of something makes no sense to me. I dare say most people who watch motor racing don't actually race cars.

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