Hacker News: alunaryak

New comment by alunaryak in "Next Week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo Could Be Bay Area’s Last"

alunaryak — Sat, 11 May 2019 02:03:58 +0000

I helped present a Tesla coil demo at one of the first Maker Faires (maybe 2006 or 2007?) and it was an absolute blast. It was also decidedly no frills, focused on the artsy, crazy, creative projects. I don't recall much, if anything, in the way of commercial products.

I wonder if it would be financially tenable if they scale it down and get back that home grown feel. Then again the bay area is a very different place now.

New comment by alunaryak in "Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations"

alunaryak — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 17:13:21 +0000

tig is great -- it makes it very easy to stage individual lines of code (using 1) or to reset unstaged changes on a file (using ! in the status view).

New comment by alunaryak in "Introducing the GoodWatch"

alunaryak — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 03:52:55 +0000

It's definitely getting long in the tooth, but I believe a few places still stock them. Mouser & Digikey both have a handful in stock.

Mouser: https://www.mouser.com/search/refine.aspx?Ntk=P_MarCom&Ntt=1...

Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/texas-instrum...

New comment by alunaryak in "Introducing the GoodWatch"

alunaryak — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 16:12:35 +0000

This is a bit orthogonal, but if you're interested in the watch form factor, TI makes a really neat watch dev board for the MSP430 that has a built-in accelerometer and support for wireless sensors.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

New comment by alunaryak in "Program FPGAs with Go"

alunaryak — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 01:21:38 +0000

I hear what you're saying, but Chisel is a lot closer to an RTL like Verilog than it is to OpenCL.

New comment by alunaryak in "Program FPGAs with Go"

alunaryak — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 01:19:46 +0000

Terasic makes good Altera boards such as the $100 DE0-Nano series, and Digilent makes a decent Xilinx Artix-based dev board for around the same price. They both have decent community support, but just be aware that setting up the dev environment and getting all of the USB cable permissions sorted out (especially on linux) can take time. It's worth sticking with, though, because FPGAs are a blast to mess around with. The sheer compute power available to you is fun.

[1] http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...

[2] http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-artix-7-fpga-development-b...

New comment by alunaryak in "Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming"

alunaryak — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 17:26:31 +0000

I like the idea of a physical analog to game logic, e.g. tripping a certain condition based on collision mechanics. This could be useful for something akin to Game Maker, and I'd be curious to see how it would translate to other mediums. I could imagine front end programming would be well suited for this style, especially when creating interactive prototypes.