Its been along time since I found myself literally flying the edge of the envelope while developing applications. My work days for the week so far, and I include the entire weekend, have been in the pursuit of answers to problems in developing for NETMF 4.2 on a Fez Cerb40 system.
This great little machine boasts memory and IO to spare, it has UARTS and SPI connections, USB and general purpose IO and comes in a 40 in DIL package the same size as an old Zilog Z-80 processor.
It runs the .Net micro framework and can do a bunch of sophisticated stuff. The ARM processor is fast and competent and is going to spend its life inside an "object" that is smaller than an old-fashioned Nokia phone and will connect to a webservice once a day for however long its Lithium Polymer battery lasts and do cool stuff.
I feel like I'm back in the 1980's when developing was a challenge that included counting the number of bytes left in the system and wondering where you could squeeze a table of 90 values in. I feel like my skills as a software architect who feels quite happy with a massive database and a credit-derivative trading system are wholly inadequate to the challenge of making a colour LCD screen 2 inches across convey meaningful information to my user, although, i'll have a bloody good go!
Twenty five years ago I worked to create peripherals for Sinclair Spectrum home computers and various stand-alone gizmos with Z-80 and 8051 style processors. I find that in the intervening years. everything has got smaller, faster and more complicated inasmuch as I never had an IP stack to deal with but its all just the same!
I can tie a couple of transistors to a processor and drive a motor and I can drive a couple of hundred LEDs to make a cool light display. At the end of the day though, my success depends on my ability to take absolutely brand-new technology and adapt it so that anyone, from my six year old son to my eighty year old dad can look at it, understand it and use it to enhance their lives.
Ups and downs can be a good thing if you like roller-coasters!
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