not everything on here has to be difficult, surely?

I’ve also been around this industry for a *long* time. Wire wrapping our own 6502, Z80, 6800 systems in the old day was the norm. I’m not impressed by people who do this today, yet some sites seem to make a big deal out of it.

That said, I do have a lot of respect for people who design and implement their own CPUs, whether it’s in TTL, bitslice type processors, or FPGAs. That requires a lot more smarts than we did to take a stock Z80, etc design, and add some additional memory, I/O, or any other cookbook type technology.

It seems this is a lost artform. I say “good work” to the guy who got this Python script working on a serial terminal. I’m sure he learned something.

But hack-a-day worthy? Hitting every DIY website? It’s just not an impressive project. To me, it’s in the same class as making a LED blink.

Have I put up or shut up? No. I build my projects, large and small, and use them. I’m terrible about documenting them. Once they work or do what I want (which is not always the same thing!), I lose interest in them.

http://www.tinymicros.com/wiki/1-wire_network Here’s something I did with Dallas 1-wire. It’s *trivial*. No rocket science, no magic, no hard thinking. And the only reason this page exists is because the OWFS group wanted examples of projects that used the OWFS. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered. It’s not impressive, and barely interesting.

To me, it just seems a lot of the projects that make the rounds on the DIY scene are as impressive as building your own PC (i.e., buy motherboard, memory, HD, case, and assembling them together).

Impressing me takes something unique, that hasn’t been done before, or a good variation on it. Apply technology in a an unusual way or for an unusual purpose. Making an avalanche sensor out of a smoke detector and an AVR. That’d be cool! Devices that have social value, for the handicapped, 3rd world countries, etc.

Should you care about impressing me? Absolutely not. My opinion doesn’t matter one iota to anyone else, nor should it. I’m just stating what it takes for me to go “wow”.

A technology expert that can’t spell cereal? Shame on you.

the criticizing is against the posting as it’s just not hack a day worthy.

as for put up or shut up.
I have a 44780 20×2 lcd on my desk right now feeding me twitter updates. same thing. is there a link? no, because I don’t think it’s online worthy.

I say: Put up, or shut up.

If you want to criticize someone else’s work, whether it’s a ‘hack’ or not, you should post a link to something you’ve done.

because I used to love this place but things like this… wow. a 16×2 44780 lcd… on a protoboard… geez.
not sure what else to read though other than Make blog. but theres so much advertising it’s like standing in a mall with a used car salesman shouting at you.

Sad as it is, I think he would be able to turn a buck doing something as simple as that. The “wow” threshold for hackaday readers is a lot higher than your average Joe. Whose to say there is any harm in that?

on another unrelated note…

is it just me or does _every_ post that caleb kraft makes receive some sort of comment along the lines of “not a hack!” ?? Also, i can’t bring myself to ignore the _frequent_ misspellings… ie: “sereial” in the first sentence while in the second sentence it is spelled correctly. bad grammar i can tolerate… horrible spelling is a totally different matter.

you’ll make milions!

Sorry, can’t count myself impressed on this one.