Update:

Just finished up a proposal, and am waiting for final negotiations, in the
meantime, my attentions turn back to my robot project.

I'm trying to understand why I haven't seriously used any of my electronic
tools in over a decade. Sure, I've used them here and there, but haven't
really built anything in years. I have old breadboards laying around,
everything from ECL based wave form generators, to A/D converters, to old
Z80 based microprocessors. Why did I stop?

I think I know the answer: Windows NT. Seriously, this is *not* windows
bashing, but it is an observation. Creating a Windows device driver is
*not* fun. On Windows NT, less so.

I never wanted to do anything on DOS windows because I would just do it on
DOS. The NT thing was a PITA. I had done a bunch of drivers for NT, I even
wrote an article about how to create a device which uses DeviceIOControl()
on both Win9x and NT with the same driver source. I wrote a DPC layer Win9x
using events. Using macros and different link libraries, your C++ code
could compile as a Win9x driver or a WinNT driver. It was cool, and
probably as easy as it gets to write a simple driver. The point is that the
development cycle is annoying at best.

Using Linux, I am rekindling my hardware hacking hobby. It is fun. I can
hack test routines, execute them as root, play and debug *easily* and when
I fully understand the behavior of the device, I can move the interface
code to the kernel. It is *really* easy to do this. Doing this stuff is fun
again.

mlw wrote:

You have a point. Driver writing in Linux is *really* easy. I created
my first driver with only a few years of programming experience, and
just a few months of Linux experience. All it took was reading a bit
from "Linux Device Drivers" from O'Reilly, and I could write a driver
that interfaced with custom hardware on a Linux In A Box machine. Quite
fun indeed.

I'm currently looking for time to do my next project, involving
connecting a custom LED display I have in my scrap pile to the computer.
I want to use it to monitor various events. I also plan to use some
bits from an old VCR to make a remote control for the machine. There
may be easier ways of doing these things, but it isn't nearly as fun
(for an engineer, that is).

--
PeKaJe

Pohl's law:
Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

mlw wrote:
This point was noted by Microsoft engineers back when they wrote the
memo that became the 'Halloween Documents' (I think its still over on
http://www.opensource.org/). It describes why Microsoft really got
scared of Linux.

--
Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
note to spammers: a Washington State resident
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Ask me about my vow of silence.