The Sacred & the Profane: the search for simplicity in the total hardware-software combination


If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to Knowledge Engineering & Emerging Technologies.


January 31st, 2024 (4th ed)1

The aim of this article is to encourage you to take an end-to-end perspective in your designs, seeking to minimize the overall complexity of your system, of the hardware-software-user combination. To achieve this, it is helpful to understand how computing, and within that, how the notions of the sacred and the profane have evolved over the past 60 or so years.2

The following remarks set out a ‘true north’ perspective for this conversation:

  1. “We are reaching the stage of development where each new generation of participants is unaware both of their overall technological ancestry and the history of the development of their speciality, and have no past to build upon.” – J.A.N. Lee, [Lee, 1996, p.54].
  2. “Any [one] can make things bigger, more complex. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Ernst F. Schumacher, 1973, from “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”.3
  3. “The goal [is] simple: to minimize the complexity of the hardware-software combination. [Apart from] some lip service perhaps, no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is of great concern to me.” – Chuck Moore, [Moore, 1999] (For a succinct introduction to Chuck Moore’s minimalism, see Less is Moore by Sam Gentle, [Gentle, 2015]
  4. “The arc of change is long, but it bends towards simplicity”, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.4

The discussion requires a familiarity with lower-level computing, i.e. computing that is close to the underlying hardware. If you already have some familiarity with this, you can jump straight in to section 2. For all backgrounds, the discussions in the Interlude (section 4) make for especially enlightening reading. Whether you find yourself in violent agreement or disagreement, your perspective is welcomed in the comments!

Between complexity and simplicity, progress, and new layers of abstraction.

Continue reading this article…

  1. 3rd ed. (Jul 20, 2021), 2nd ed. (Apr 9, 2014, addition of GCC history), 1st ed. (May 2, 2010)
  2. * Sacred: Worthy of respect or dedication. Devoted to a single purpose. Profane: Violating the sacred character of a place or language. Irreverent toward what is held to be sacred.
  3. This quote by Ernst F. Schumacher is often incorrectly attributed to Einstein
  4. Martin Luther King’s actual phrase was “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”, 1965 You can see an example of this in Ian Hogarth’s discussion about the contest between tokamak and stellerator in the evolution of nuclear fusion technology. (Short version: the tomkamak surged ahead despite its complexity to operate as it was easy to design, but the real breakthrough will likely be achieved by the stellerator as it is simple to operate though harder to design.)

Programming Microcontrollers – low power, small footprints, & fast prototypes, using Arduino, Atmel, & GForth

This article explains how to use the Arduino toolchain to program microcontrollers from the Arduino IDE using their bootloaders, and also burning bootloaders directly onto bare microcontroller chips. It covers developing interactively with Forth (rapid prototyping), and moving your creations from a development board (Nano, Uno) to a standalone, low-cost, low-power, small footprint chip such as the ATMega328P or ATTiny85 or ATTiny84. Each of these microcontrollers is powerful, inexpensive, and allows using 3V batteries directly without the need to boost voltage to 5V. Additionally, we describe how to build an inexpensive (under £5), standalone 3-chip Atmel AVR universal bootloading programmer that you can use to program all of the chips above.
Continue reading this article…

Voice-controlled Hardware: Making Sensors Talk for Under £5

Voice controlled hardware requires four capabilities: (1) vocal response to trigger events (sensors/calculations-to-brain), (2) speech generation (brain-to-mouth), (3) speech recognition (ear-to-brain), and (4) speech understanding (brain-to-database, aka learning). These capabilities can increasingly be implemented using off-the-shelf modules, due to progress in advanced low-cost silicon capable of digital signal processing (DSP) and statistical learning/machine learning/AI.

In this article we look at the value chain involved in building voice control into hardware. We cover highlights in the history of artificial speech. And we show how to convert an ordinary sensor into a talking sensor for less than £5. We demonstrate this by building a Talking Passive Infra-Red (PIR) motion sensor deployed as part of an April Fool’s Day prank (jump to the design video and demonstration video).

The same design pattern can be used to create any talking sensor, with applications abounding around home, school, work, shop, factory, industrial site, mass-transit, public space, or interactive art/engineering/museum display.

Bringing Junk Model Robots to life with Talking Motion Sensors (April Fools Prank, 2021)

Continue reading this article…

LOGIC in a Nutshell: Theory & Application (including a Forth simulator, and digital circuit design)


This article looks at Propositional Logic, also called Statement Calculus, from a combinatorial and algebraic point of view (Sections 3-6), its implementation in software (Section 7), and its application to digital electronics (Section 10). Historical sections cover the shift in viewpoint from classical logic based on Aristotle’s syllogism to modern symbolic logic (Section 2) and the axiomatization of logic (Section 9). (See logic sourcebook for the original source papers (1830-1881) that drove this shift.)

In Section 7, we implement the grammar of the statement calculus in the Symbolic Logic Simulator (SLS), a program written in 28 lines of Forth code, that allows computer-aided verification of any theorem in Propositional Logic (see Appendix 1 for source code). The program makes it straight-forward to explore non-obvious logical identities, and verify any propositional logic theorem or conjecture, in particular see Appendix 2 for key identities in the statement calculus (duality, algebraic, and canonical identities).

The concept of linguistic adequacy is developed in Section 8 and the NAND Adequacy Theorem is proved showing that NAND can generate all logical operations. A corollary is that any digital logic circuit can be built up entirely using NAND gates, illustrated using the free Digital Works software.

Continue reading this article…

Seven Fields of Computer Programming: A Brief Survey

Written July 7th, 2012, Revised Jan 12th, 2013, Updated & extended Jan 25th, 2020

There are at least seven distinct fields of computer programming that have less to do with languages and more to do with the target platform, desired functionality, and intended user. This article provides a short introduction to each, intended as a brief orienting survey. These are:
(1) Bare metal programming, not requiring an operating system,
(2) Application programming, in which an operating system is presumed,
(3) Mathematical computing and algorithms, from matrix computations and statistical learning to wavelet compression and cryptography,
(4) Web or Client-Server programming, in which the application lives in a client browser in communication with content generated on-the-fly from programs running on central servers,
(5) Mobile or App programming,
(6) Cloud programming, and
(7) Exotic programming (traditional super-computing, quantum computing, biological computing/soft robotics, deep machine learning).

Continue reading this article…

Experimenting with Microcontrollers – an Arduino development kit for under £10

For under £10, you can put together a microcontroller development platform, ready to program directly from your PC over USB using free Arduino software. Once programmed, your microcontroller will run autonomously, untethered from your PC, powered by as small a battery power supply as a single 1.5V AAA or 3V CR2032 coin cell. You can have it interact with its environment using dozens of low-cost sensors and motors. Everything you need to explore the exciting world of embedded systems is available to you, typically for less than a day pass on the London underground.

An Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £13

A homebrew Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £12 (including optional OLED display)

Continue reading this article…

Notepad++ (Text Editor)

If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3.

1. Notepad++: a programmable, extensible, feature-rich text editor

NotePad++ (NPP) is an open-source text editor with outstanding built-in features that can be further enhanced with 16 highly recommended plugins, and customized with your own configurations. This makes NPP an invaluable power-tool capable of far more than text editing — it can serve as an automation engine, a complex calculator (e.g. between hex, binary, and decimal), or can be configured to be a light-weight IDE for any toolchain you wish! Indeed, it is the second application (after Total Commander) which I install on any new Windows computer.

This article details a selection of useful capabilities of NPP and its plugins. It also shares a pre-configured Notepad++ package that I use (20.0MB compressed, 50.0MB uncompressed), for you to download. All these configurations are fully portable, so you will only need to unpack NPP to your drive and run it from there (notepad++.exe).

Notepad++, by Don Ho, multi-view with syntax highlghting

Notepad++, by Don Ho, multi-view with syntax highlghting


Continue reading this article…

Coding for pre-schoolers: a ‘Turtle Logo’ in Forth

*New!* (29 Aug 2020) – Turtle Logo v1.8 (portable) is available! Developer kit with source code included. Suitable from ages 3 years to adult. (970 lines of Forth code).


1. Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.

A challenge facing parents and teachers is how to help children develop ‘builder’ relationships with technology rather than being limited to the passive consumption of content created by others. The consensus on what’s important for older kids and adults is clear: coding. This enables children to participate in the creation of their own technological “micro-worlds” — environments rich in educational potential.[14]

This autumn, spurred by having our own young children (one aged 4 years, the other 16 months), we began an experiment, the result of which is a Turtle Logo program for Windows computers (freely downloadable) that is simple enough to be accessible for children from 3 years and older, while providing an extensible platform that can grow with the child.

The long-term goal is to enable children to express their creativity, artistry, and natural ‘builder’ impulses using coding, computer graphics, and robotics as readily as the previous generation could using paints, brushes, and building blocks.

Turtle Logo - Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.

Turtle Logo – Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.

Continue reading this article…

Bare Bones Programming: The C Language

…for Embedded and Low-Level Systems Development

C provides the convenience of learning one language while retaining the ability to target a variety of platforms including modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac), real-time operating systems, systems-on-a-chip, and a host of microcontrollers for embedded development. And if you have to “mov” the bits around yourself (device drivers, DMA controllers), you can do that too. This is a significant efficiency over assembly languages which are essentially chip-specific control codes and therefore require understanding the architecture of the target chip.

Continue reading this article…

Stats: 1,066,417 article views since 2010 (March update)

Dear Readers:

Welcome to the conversation!  We publish long-form pieces as well as a curated collection of spotlighted articles covering a broader range of topics.   Notifications for new long-form articles are through the feeds (you can join below).  We love hearing from you.  Feel free to leave your thoughts in comments, or use the contact information to reach us!

Reading List…

Looking for the best long-form articles on this site? Below is a curated list by the main topics covered.

Mathematics-History & Philosophy

  1. What is Mathematics?
  2. Prehistoric Origins of Mathematics
  3. The Mathematics of Uruk & Susa (3500-3000 BCE)
  4. How Algebra Became Abstract: George Peacock & the Birth of Modern Algebra (England, 1830)
  5. The Rise of Mathematical Logic: from Laws of Thoughts to Foundations for Mathematics
  6. Mathematical Finance and The Rise of the Modern Financial Marketplace
  7. A Course in the Philosophy and Foundations of Mathematics
  8. The Development of Mathematics
  9. Catalysts in the Development of Mathematics
  10. Characteristics of Modern Mathematics

Electronic & Software Engineering

  1. Electronics in the Junior School - Gateway to Technology
  2. Coding for Pre-Schoolers - A Turtle Logo in Forth
  3. Experimenting with Microcontrollers - an Arduino development kit for under £12
  4. Making Sensors Talk for under £5, and Voice Controlled Hardware
  5. Computer Programming: A brief survey from the 1940s to the present
  6. Forth, Lisp, & Ruby: languages that make it easy to write your own domain specific language (DSL)
  7. Programming Microcontrollers: Low Power, Small Footprints & Fast Prototypes
  8. Building a 13-key pure analog electronic piano.
  9. TinyPhoto: Embedded Graphics and Low-Fat Computing
  10. Computing / Software Toolkits
  11. Assembly Language programming (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)
  12. Bare Bones Programming: The C Language

Pure & Applied Mathematics

  1. Fuzzy Classifiers & Quantile Statistics Techniques in Continuous Data Monitoring
  2. LOGIC in a Nutshell: Theory & Applications (including a FORTH simulator and digital circuit design)
  3. Finite Summation of Integer Powers: (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)
  4. The Mathematics of Duelling
  5. A Radar Tracking Approach to Data Mining
  6. Analysis of Visitor Statistics: Data Mining in-the-Small
  7. Why Zero Raised to the Zero Power IS One

Technology: Sensors & Intelligent Systems

  1. Knowledge Engineering & the Emerging Technologies of the Next Decade
  2. Sensors and Systems
  3. Unmanned Autonomous Systems & Networks of Sensors
  4. The Advance of Marine Micro-ROVs

Math Education

  1. Teaching Enriched Mathematics, Part 1
  2. Teaching Enriched Mathematics, Part 2: Levelling Student Success Factors
  3. A Course in the Philosophy and Foundations of Mathematics
  4. Logic, Proof, and Professional Communication: five reflections
  5. Good mathematical technique and the case for mathematical insight

Explore…

Timeline