Simplicity [was Re: Omnibus to USB - still some boards left!]

(I have some remarks on these, which I'll save for later.) I think tony's right, here. Recently, I was involved in a project which wanted to turn a small camera on for maybe a second or two every couple of minutes (it was doing time-lapse filming of a building construction project). And it was battery-powered, so just discarding most of the frames in software wasn't much of an option. The principal other person immediately thought of an Arduino. (These days, perhaps a Teensy instead - this was before Teensies, I think.) I thought of a 555. (I used an external transistor as a switch; the Arduino design was never firmed up enough to know, but it probably would have had to do something similar.) I breadboarded it and the 555 way turned out to draw something like 20% the power of an idling Arduino. This meant the battery life was substantially extended; given the difficulty of replacing the batteries, this was a not inconsiderable gain. But someone who jumped to the "use a microcontroller" answer would have missed it entirely. Not always. But it is certainly possible for it to be. No...but `abundance' in that sense is not present here. At least not for the sense I understand you to mean: abundance as in "there's such an excess that there's no point putting a price on it because everyone can have all they want and we'll still have plenty left over". I'm not sure I agree, but I don't think it matters, because there _is_ virtue in the absence of wastefulness. Whether using a full-fledged computer to drive a blinkenlight or two is wastefulness is something that it is reasonable to debate. Personally, I think it is, even today. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B