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[Mike Sokol]

Never did pick up any girls with this trick though...

I'm SO surprised... 

I'm pretty sure that Binary to Hex to Decimal conversions in your head has NEVER been used to pick up a girl in a bar.

"Hey baby, there are 10 types of people in this bar.. those who understand binary, and those who don't. Which one are you?" 

[Tommy Peel]

While in my 20's and doing a lot of machine code programming, I figured out how to convert binary to hex to decimal and back in my head. I also had much of the ASCII table memorized and won a lot of bar bets for free drinks (it was a nerdy bar). And I could look at a serial RS-232 feed from a terminal on an o'scope and read off the letters it was sending. Not too fast, mind you. But if it repeated for a second or so I could recognize the patterns.

Nearly 40 years later when my son was taking computer networking class at tech school, I showed him the mental trick on how to do the binary to hex to decimal conversion in his head, and he was able to scare the teacher with these same mental conversions. Nowadays you can get an app for that, but it's really cool to do it inside your head. Never did pick up any girls with this trick though... 

I'm glad my programing experience was simpler than that... C, C++, C#, Objective-C, HTML, and Java are much simpler than machine code.    I did a rather interesting senior project last fall; we(well I coded most of it but it was a group project) made an iOS app to read temperature with a sensor attached to the headphone port of the device. We used a device developed by the University of Michigan called the Hijack to interface the sensor with the headphone port. They had already done a lot of the hard programing as there was a pre-made library we downloaded and were able to call in our program to talk to the sensor.

[John Roberts {JR}]

If you are going to measure temp, why not do something useful.

You can make a temperature sensor out of a simple diode. The voltage across the junction varies linearly with temperature XmV/degree. I reprogrammed one of my tuner PC boards to be 24 hour programmable thermostat. Added a couple diodes in series fed into one of the microprocessor  A/D inputs to sense room temperature. Added a opto-scr and power triac to turn on and off a 1kW  baseboard heater.  Now my back bedroom is always the perfect temp at night when I need it, and not heated at all during the day.

I prefer coding in assembler.. it's more like analog design with direct cause and effect. High level languages are more abstract and harder for me to get good specific results.

JR

[Steve M Smith]

I prefer coding in assembler.. it's more like analog design with direct cause and effect. High level languages are more abstract and harder for me to get good specific results.

I feel the same way.  I enjoy designing analogue circuits but get bored with digital.

I'm o.k. with programming Z80, 8085, etc. and PIC processors at assembly language and/or hex code level but don't have a clue about C+ or Visual Basic.  I can do GWBASIC.

I think we're just old!


Steve.

[Tommy Peel]

I feel the same way.  I enjoy designing analogue circuits but get bored with digital.

I'm o.k. with programming Z80, 8085, etc. and PIC processors at assembly language and/or hex code level but don't have a clue about C+ or Visual Basic.  I can do GWBASIC.

I think we're just old!


Steve.

:-) I have a feeling that both of yall have a much deeper understanding of what's actually going on in a computer than I do. I love how modern programming software let's you just drag and drop the UI elements then click the right button to program what the element does(Xcode and Visual Studio do this though they are very different from each other).

If you are going to measure temp, why not do something useful.

You can make a temperature sensor out of a simple diode. The voltage across the junction varies linearly with temperature XmV/degree. I reprogrammed one of my tuner PC boards to be 24 hour programmable thermostat. Added a couple diodes in series fed into one of the microprocessor  A/D inputs to sense room temperature. Added a opto-scr and power triac to turn on and off a 1kW  baseboard heater.  Now my back bedroom is always the perfect temp at night when I need it, and not heated at all during the day.

I prefer coding in assembler.. it's more like analog design with direct cause and effect. High level languages are more abstract and harder for me to get good specific results.

JR

The project was more of a proof of concept. It was originally going to measure humidity but we couldn't get the right sensor. There were pretty severe voltage restrictions with the hijack; I think it would only output around 2.8 volts at very low milliamps to power a sensor. Most of the sensors run at ~5 volts....

Sent from my Nexus 4 running XeonHD + HellsCore b46-t4 using Tapatalk Pro

[Steve M Smith]

I love how modern programming software let's you just drag and drop the UI elements then click the right button to program what the element does

Whilst that is quite clever and is obviously an efficient way of doing things, I get the feeling that someone else has doe the clever bit and that I wouldn't get the satisfaction of knowing I had created something if all I did was drag and drop pre-programmed elements into place to make it do what I wanted.

I also wonder about some of the younger people I deal with at work sometimes.  I am often shown their ideas for doing something fairly simple which might involve a microprocessor, some logic and I/O and some programming and I think to myself* 'I could achieve that with just a few transistors or 4000 series CMOS ICs'.

I think people now are brainwashed into thinking that everything needs to be computer controlled.

* Actually, I don't think it to myself - I usually tell them!


Steve.

[Tommy Peel]

Whilst that is quite clever and is obviously an efficient way of doing things, I get the feeling that someone else has doe the clever bit and that I wouldn't get the satisfaction of knowing I had created something if all I did was drag and drop pre-programmed elements into place to make it do what I wanted.
...


Steve.

There is coding involved though not, for the most part, for the UI. All the logic behind the interface still requires plenty of code, though I'm sure it looks quite a bit different than  what you're used to. There was a lot of trial and error involved in getting the app I mentioned above working, and lots of Google searching to resolve errors. One problem we ran into is the hijack libraries we used had been made in a version of Xcode that was a couple of versions older(3.x versus 5.x) than what I had; reusing that code in the new project required a lot of fixing and random tweaking. I'd fix one error and 20 more would materialize. :-)



Sent from my Nexus 4 running XeonHD + HellsCore b46-t4 using Tapatalk Pro

[Steve M Smith]

though I'm sure it looks quite a bit different than  what you're used to.

The bottom left area of this picture is Z80 assembly language:



The bit at the top left is hexadecimal.  For simple programmes, it was common to write directly in hex without bothering with the assembler.

We also had to make a circuit board to run it on. Usually something like this:




Steve.

[Tommy Peel]

The bottom left area of this picture is Z80 assembly language:



The bit at the top left is hexadecimal.  For simple programmes, it was common to write directly in hex without bothering with the assembler.

We also had to make a circuit board to run it on. Usually something like this:




Steve.

Interesting, but well out of my range of knowledge. :-)

Sent from my Nexus 4 running XeonHD + HellsCore b46-t4 using Tapatalk Pro

[Mark McFarlane]

Whilst that is quite clever and is obviously an efficient way of doing things, I get the feeling that someone else has doe the clever bit and that I wouldn't get the satisfaction of knowing I had created something if all I did was drag and drop pre-programmed elements into place to make it do what I wanted....

I've done some assembly language programming on 680xx, 6502, and and 80xx architectures decades ago, and have gone through various higher level languages such as Fortran, Pascal, Modula 2, C, C++, C# and Java.  I still do some work in Fortran, there is still nothing that can beat the optimizations of a good Fortran compiler except hand-rolled assembly.   

I'm happy today to reuse someone else's clever work. I'm personally more interested in the easiest route to solve a problem. 

On the flip side, we still use Fortran for algorithms that run day after day on supercomputers.  When you have thousands of computers all crunching the same data set in parallel even a small performance gain pays off in cost or turnaround. We still worry about keeping the inner kernel data the L1 cache, but do it in a higher level than assembler.  Actually, writing GPU-based code even in C is kin to assembly language programming.  5 different types of memory, each with different performance characteristics, really makes you think about how to structure the solution to a problem to keep 900+ cores spinning.

[ProSoundWeb Community]