16 Oct
2016
16 Oct
'16
8:59 a.m.
On 10/15/2016 10:48 PM, Steven M Jones wrote:
On 10/15/2016 19:39, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Well, I'm not sure. In 1996 I built a laser photoplotter.
See http://pico-systems.com/photoplot.html
for some description and a picture. It ran on a Windows 3.1
computer with an ISA bus DMA card.
I was still using it to make PC board artwork and stencils
for solder paste up to 2014, but was worried the old PC
would fail to boot someday. The program that generated the
raster image files was written in Turbo Pascal for Windows,
run under a virtual machine, and I was not sure I could
recompile it, either. I used fpc (Free Pascal Compiler) to
recompile it and clean up a bunch of things, then wrote a
program that used run-length compression to compress the
raster file. I got a Beagle Bone computer, and wrote some
code for the PRU to uncompress the run-length encoding on
the fly, and emulate the DMA card on the PC. I got all this
working in a matter of weeks, and felt REALLY good! I
haven't done that sort of software/hardware project in quite
some time.
Jon
My point blew right past you, apparently--yet I
stated it as clearly as
I could.
I got your point, Chuck, one hundred percent. It's a depressing
perspective, but I acknowledge the truth of it in my own life. Almost
every day I'm reminded that nothing is as exciting as it used to be.