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)
When designing a system, what should you optimize? If it is a user-interface or process, you should be minimizing clicks, or process steps. But for hardware-software systems, the answer is not obvious, and a common mistake is to fail to consider the end-to-end problem. This article explores what is involved in optimizing end-to-end in hardware-software systems. The goal here is to minimize the overall complexity of the system, i.e. of the triple hardware-software-user combination. The following remarks set the stage for our discussion:
- “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”.
- “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]
- “We are reaching the stage of development [in computer science] 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].
- “The arc of change is long, but it bends towards simplicity”, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.
 Between complexity and simplicity, progress, and new layers of abstraction. Continue reading this article…
TinyPhoto is a small rotating photobook embedded graphics project that uses the low-power ATtiny85 microcontroller (3mA) and a 128×64 pixel OLED display (c.5-10mA typical, 15mA max). This combination can deliver at least 20 hrs of continuous play on a 3V coin cell battery (225mAh capacity). TinyPhoto can be readily built from a handful of through-hole electronic components (12 parts, £5) organized to fit onto a 3cm x 7cm single-sided prototype PCB. The embedded software is c.150 lines of C code and uses less than 1,300 bytes of on-chip memory. TinyPhoto rotates through five user-selectable images using a total of 4,900 bytes (yes, bytes!) stored in the on-chip flash RAM. The setup produces crisp photos on the OLED display with a real-time display rate that is instantaneous to the human eye with the Tiny85 boosted to run at 8MHz. A custom device driver (200 bytes) sets up the OLED screen and enables pixel-by-pixel display. Custom Forth code converts a 0-1 color depth image into a byte-stream that can be written to the onboard flash for rapid display. It is a reminder of what can be accomplished with low-fat computing…
The magic, of course, is in the software. This article describes how this was done, and the software that enables it. Checkout the TinyPhoto review on Hackaday!
 Tiny Photo – 3cm x 7cm photo viewer powered by ATTiny85 8-bit microcontroller sending pixel level image data to OLED display (128×64 pixels), powered by 3V coin cell battery. Cycles through 5 images stored in 5kB of on-chip Flash RAM. (Note, this is 1 million times less memory than on a Windows PC with 8GB RAM). The magic is in the software. Continue reading this article…
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…
Before domain-specific languages (DSLs) and REPL environments (read, execute, print, loop) became fashionable, computing pioneer Charles (Chuck) Moore had built, by 1968, what he viewed as the perfect computer programming language, which he named FORTH (for fourth generation language). What he had kept in view during its creation was an extreme austerity in syntax and structure as he searched for the minimalist system required to interact with a computer and be able to write custom problem-oriented languages to solve them. This approach is what he considered to be “programming”: you solve your problem by developing an application specific language with multiple levels of abstraction giving you in the end a small dictionary of simple words (in code) which represents the solution cleanly and in overall the fewest lines of code. Let’s look at this idea, how it has worked out over the years, and how you can apply this, regardless of the language you choose to (or have to) work with. This article looks at Forth, Lisp & Ruby, language that make it easy to solve classes of problems by writing your own DSL, i.e. by programming a specific “problem-oriented language” in which to solve your problem.
Continue reading this article…
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…
*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. Continue reading this article…
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