I envy Zach so much, he seems to have succeeded in making his entire life about turing machines and different execution models, all while making cool games to boot.
I think it's the dream of many (including myself) to put some basic programming mechanism into everything; There's a bit of magic about having a typewriter print out your output so you can debug it here and there
I do kind of wonder how well this old-school programming style meshes with a higher-level language like Haskell. I can only imagine it being even better. A terse language with huge columns to write your ocmments/debugging. I've seen it done with APL, maybe we need J in there too.
Daisy wheel typewriters were the first consumer product with many moving parts in which all the coordination and control was entirely electronic. The electronics behind getting the print wheel into position that fast are very clever. The coarse positioning uses a stepping motor, but the fine positioning and and braking involve an analog servo loop.
I had some Brother typewriters but I think the most amazing piece of this I ever had was a (Xerox) Diablo 630. Aside from the daisywheel printhead, it had what looked like a 1/2 hp motor to move the carriage. I used to watch in amazement as this monster worked with such precision.
Cool project, but bragging about using a $10 Chinese Saleae Logic knockoff seems pretty scummy. Saleae is a tiny Bay Area company who make a great product and put a ton of hard work into their software, which is then shamelessly ripped off by the Chinese companies selling these inferior knock-offs which even steal their trademark.
If someone wrote a post about how buying the full collection of Zachtronics games for $5 from a Russian pirate site made them feel like a Gibson novel character, I imagine he’d be a bit less sanguine.
Zach, here. There's actually an open source project called Sigrok that's compatible with a ton of logic analyzers, including the one-chip knockoffs from China.
Your second scenario sounds pretty cyberpunk too! I'd certainly love it if more people purchased our games, but piracy is unavoidable. I'd rather have a Russian 12-year-old pirate our games than never get a chance to play them.
Perhaps the Saleae devices (in their beautiful machined, anodized cases) are too expensive if someone is eating their lunch for $10. (The Saleae devices are ~$100.)
I have one of the plastic, "counterfeit" knockoffs, and it works great. It would be a different story if they didn't function, but it is a fine device.
They're just bad at capitalism. If someone printing your company name on a sticker and reusing your USB VID/PID is all it takes to destroy your business, perhaps you shouldn't have that business.
Hackintoshes exist, yet Apple still sells Macs, because they are a great hardware company. Saleae is an overpriced hardware company.
PS: How is the fact that the knockoffs are Chinese or that Saleae is in the Bay Area relevant? I posit it is simply racism that you offer.
China is relevant because US trademark and copyright laws are not practically enforceable by a tiny firm against Chinese businesses selling through the internet (also because most electronics are built in China). Bay Area is relevant because paying a team of several full-time engineers several years of salary to build the software is expensive here.
Saleae could implement more intrusive hardware locks to prevent their software from working with generic devices. (And I think they’ll be forced to do that in the future.) Maybe you’re right that they deserve to fail, but that would be a pretty sad outcome for all the hobbyists and junior EEs who benefit greatly from their fantastic software (including you it sounds like).
Apple doesn’t go after hobbyists self-building Hackintoshes because it’s a vanishingly small percentage of their customer base and it’s not worth their trouble. As they exist currently, Hackintoshes cost Apple almost nothing.
However, if someone starts selling ready-to-go Hackintoshes direct to customers under the brand name “Apple Mac”, Apple legal is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks, sic the FTC on them, get some senators involved, or whatever it takes. Look how far they went after Samsung for copying iPhone hardware and software features.
I guess every company without a few hundred billion dollars of cash holdings and thousands of lawyers now counts as “bad at capitalism”? Okay.
> I have one of the plastic, "counterfeit" knockoffs, and it works great. [...] I posit it is simply racism that you offer.
Do you use Saleae’s software with it? If so, I posit that you simply lack any ethical standards. There, isn’t it fun to make judgmental personal attacks without knowing anything about a person?
Racism? Sheesh.
Edit: looking at the length of my response here, I guess you trolled me pretty effectively. Kudos.
It's not quite that simple. Saleae wrote desktop software, which is an important part of the product. By reusing the USB VID/PID I'm guessing (I've not looked at a knockoffs) that the knockoffs allow you to use Saleae's software, so you're basically stealing the software to use with your cheap hardware device.
The price difference does seem at the extreme end, but it's a lot easier to copy than to create. Saleae are doing a lot more work on product design, software development, marketing, advertising, SolidWorks licenses and all the other things that the knockoffs don't need to do. In the end if Saleae can't make a profit competing against the knockoffs then there'll be nothing to copy and no software to steal and then the knockoffs will cease to exist too.
Plus they seem to be really good guys, who have worked on this for years and really do a good job.
> It's not quite that simple. Saleae wrote desktop software, which is an important part of the product. By reusing the USB VID/PID I'm guessing (I've not looked at a knockoffs) that the knockoffs allow you to use Saleae's software, so you're basically stealing the software to use with your cheap hardware device.
Except that one can't steal software, and the copying of bytes does not harm Saleae in any way. It harms their expectation of revenue based on software development, but it's not stealing as it obviously doesn't deprive them of their own use of the software.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone can copy iOS too, but Apple's one-two punch of a) best-in-class hardware (and hardware value) and b) use of DRM prevents it.
Maybe Saleae should have used DRM (but again maybe not, as it could just be cracked).
Really though, the software argument is a red herring, because it's impossible to "steal" software. Making the software is a basic prerequisite for their own hardware being salable. It's a sunk cost. The fact that other organizations can sell compatible hardware at much, much lower prices means that perhaps the value proposition of their hardware is just sort of crap to begin with.
It's lame that the competitor is using their trademark, but I say again: if all it takes is some dude with a label printer to eat your lunch, maybe your business model sucked in the first place.
What a shame for the Saleae people. HP 1650 analyzers can be had in the $10 range (plus shipping) from eBay, but I think the bus pirate might have worked out for this hack.
I imagine if you brought noisy contraption that to a hackathon, a bunch of people working together in a room trying to cram out a project, you would make a lot of enemies very fast.
I guess that you nave never been to a demoscene event then (or it doesn't count as a hackathon in your book).
Lots of chance that there are teams there working in frenzy to finish their demo in time while across the table others are busy boozing till they drop (accompanied by the requisite loud banter).
If a team really need quiet time at such an event, they usually retire to (the basement/a hotel/someone's garage/a coffeeshop).
And no, they don't just hack software demos at such events, I've come across (noisy) 3D printers, pinball tables, slot machines, robots in many sizes and shapes, RC racing cars, drones, you name it.
I envy Zach so much, he seems to have succeeded in making his entire life about turing machines and different execution models, all while making cool games to boot.
I think it's the dream of many (including myself) to put some basic programming mechanism into everything; There's a bit of magic about having a typewriter print out your output so you can debug it here and there
I do kind of wonder how well this old-school programming style meshes with a higher-level language like Haskell. I can only imagine it being even better. A terse language with huge columns to write your ocmments/debugging. I've seen it done with APL, maybe we need J in there too.