Feature: Embedded
Figure 1: A Sinclair ZX80, released in 1980. It was an instant-on machine that booted straight into a BASIC interpreter’s prompt
“WarGames” that home microcomputers could not only control but even destroy the world. It took a while for something vaguely to that eff ect to become a reality.
Today’s world of embedded design Today, with the advent of microcontroller boards we can control our entire homes, projects and even much of what is going on in the world outside – including deadly drones and missiles, as the latest European war shows us every day. Yet, something essential is missing which most of us took for granted then: imminence. I speak of the imminence of instant-on machines that don’t
A control panel for driving the world
By Bernardo Kastrup, System Development Engineer
I
was six or seven years old back in 1981, when I fi rst put my hands on a piece of technology so mind-blowing to me, it seemed magical: a Sinclair ZX80 home microcomputer; see Figure 1. I could command that miraculous little thing with just a few keystrokes, fi lling the television screen in my living room with my name! Never had I felt so
powerful. If I could use that thing to appear on television myself, what else could I do with it? In my mind, those forty membrane buttons constituted an
almost Godly control panel to, well, ... steer the course of the world! Aſt er all, Matthew Broderick showed us in the 1983 fi lm
20 December/January 2023
www.electronicsworld.co.uk Figure 2: Agon light
require installing a complex operating system before use, and that don’t have to boot into that operating system from mass storage every time they are turned on or reset. T is is the imminence of issuing direct BASIC commands and having them instantly executed, without having to compile anything; the imminence of lag- free, bare-metal control over the hardware sensors and actuators; the imminence of systems unburdened by layers of abstraction, drivers, libraries, virtual machines and what-not. Cheap and powerful as a Raspberry Pi is, it is still a complex Linux machine that, in addition to lacking GPIOs and other
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