Re: [ha] Goals (long)

Rich (rah.at.atdot.org)
Sat, 24 Oct 1998 01:01:46 -0400

> This may be more philosophical than practical, but I have an aversion
> to using standards where the body setting the standard wants me to pay
> for it. They might not want much money, and if it is a good standard,
> it might be money well spent for the effort they put in to designing it,
> but it still rankles.

>From an industry where I pay $500 for a copy of a spec from the
clearinghouse body, I relish this suggestion. ;-{)

> I vote we adopt the GPL in spirit and hope we never have to put it to
> the test.

Seconded.

> Mostly that just rules out some sorts of
> document files, since there are almost always free tool to do anything
> useful (I don't actually know of any free PCB auto-routers though...).

Maybe we just haven't looked hard enough. Or maybe we might be
taking this to a level we don't want to. Electronics magazines
publish layouts for their PCBs in their pages, don't they?

I'd suggest wire-wrap but I worked with it in a design laborartory for
a few evil years coding and debugging logic circuits. No wire-wrap,
please. :-{)

> The line gets more blurred the closer you get to hardware though. One of
> Rick's suggestions was to use the BASIC Stamp controller. Because I
> don't have the source to its innards, I'm wary. But go another step to
> the 68HC11, which I use all the time, and I'm quite happy, even though I
> don't have the microcode it runs. I suppose it comes to a point where
> I can't imagine wanting to redesign what's inside, and at that point
> I'm happy to buy it off the shelf.

The Stamp was a suggestion to leverage a pretty generally
available processor. I'm comfortable in any iteration up or down to
agree upon a 'level of propriety' above which we won't go.

More later.

--
"Hey, nice crysknife!"