Provided that I know both (or many) ways to do something, had I to decide on what to suggest, I would decide along a decision tree, starting precisely with this below:

I think it depends if the electronics are the project or the electronics are the "nice-to-have" addition to the project.

But quite frequently all I know is a hammer...

 

Umm, did you check the date of that article?

Yes.
Is that pertinent to the joke?

 

Yes.
Is that pertinent to the joke?

No, but reading that article made me expect a clicky-keyboard sound from my touch-screen as I entered my next search into the navigation text box.

 

No, but reading that article made me expect a clicky-keyboard sound from my touch-screen as I entered my next search into the navigation text box.

Well, for you youngsters, that stuff is ancient history, for me it's just history that I've lived through.

Speaking of old sounds, try the challenge of working in the same room with the sound of an operating dot-matrix mechanical printer (is there a more annoying sound?). Occasionally I will be in a business where they use them to print out carbon-copy forms of their invoices and I still cringe a little when I hear it.

 

Occasionally I will be in a business where they use them to print out carbon-copy forms of their invoices and I still cringe a little when I hear it.

I was in such a business a couple of days ago and they didn't have the new credit card readers yet and they pointed out their dot matrix printer. I commented that most of their employees probably don't know about the old manual-swipe credit card machines and he pulled theirs out from under the counter and said that that's still how their delivery drivers process credit cards.

 

try the challenge of working in the same room with the sound of an operating dot-matrix mechanical printe

I had my neighbors try that challenge in the middle of the night one time that I had to work overtime, and meet a deadline to hand over some plans the next morning... they didn't like it, and forced me into moving my printer into a closet full of clothing, so as to muffle the sound a bit

 

Often that's a symptom of exactly what I was referring to -- many of those recommendations come from people that only know how to throw an Arduino at it. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks suspiciously like a nail.

Or a skull.

 

Or a skull.

Like an Arduino, a hammer is also a multipurpose tool.

But seriously, comparing an Arduino to a hammer and nail is like a caveman making fun of people who use an alphabet instead of cave art to communicate. What a strange fear of progress - especially for technologists that should be looking for innovation. Who cares if it is overkill for a design. 99% of all laptops, desktops, tablets or phones are a huge overkill for email, web surfing, texting or talking. We still buy them and we still insist on higher performance than previous models for out next one.

 

No one has mentioned that the "simplicity" of using a micro presumes you understand how a micro works and know how to code one.
Perhaps that's trivial to learn for some people but it certainly wasn't for me.
And C is like learning a cryptic foreign language (my favorite take on that is that it was actually an April Fool's Joke.)
So I think the effort needed to understand how a micro works and learning a computer language, as well as buying and learning to use the programmer and it's operating environment, needs to be factored in before it is suggested to a newbie that he use a micro for the job.

+1 like for you.

I couldn't agree more. It seems to me that a lot of code monkeys who advocate going the MCU route only do so because that's the only way they know, and discount the steep learning curve and the cost of tools as irrelevant, even if a simple hardware solution, requiring neither, is appropriate.

 

Like an Arduino, a hammer is also a multipurpose tool.

But seriously, comparing an Arduino to a hammer and nail is like a caveman making fun of people who use an alphabet instead of cave art to communicate. What a strange fear of progress - especially for technologists that should be looking for innovation. Who cares if it is overkill for a design. 99% of all laptops, desktops, tablets or phones are a huge overkill for email, web surfing, texting or talking. We still buy them and we still insist on higher performance than previous models for out next one.

I wasn't comparing an Arduino to a hammer, I was commenting on what happens when you only have a single tool, whatever it might be, at your disposal.

 

Pretty similar to yours. Like most things, Arduinos are a mixed bag that can either be used well or abused horribly -- and that's from both a technical and an educational standpoint.

Yes, they can help draw in people that otherwise would never have given electronics a try. That's arguably good -- only arguably because many of those people (not all, by any means) are people that probably should have never given electronics a try. But we have lost so many of the traditional ways of drawing people in, such as home automotive maintenance and amateur radio, that we need to find new ways and things like Arduinos are one such way.

The flip side is that, even for many of the people that had an interest in electronics anyway, things like Arduinos (and the list of other things is insanely long) have a tendency to let people accomplish their project goals while never gaining an understanding of what is really going on. To some degree this isn't a bad thing, but it does rob us of large numbers of people that have sound, fundamental skills.

There are, admittedly, fewer folks around who can do long division or square rooting by hand than there were a few hundred years ago, but so what?

We now have Charles Babbage's concepts and Alan Turing's insights and his wonderful machines' algorithms implemented in electronic forms, which frees us from having to do the onerous, repetitious grunt work, which most of us hate

What's wrong with that?

 

There are, admittedly, fewer folks around who can do long division or square rooting by hand than there were a few hundred years ago, but so what?

We now have Charles Babbage's concepts and Alan Turing's insights and wonderful machines implemented in various electronic forms, which frees us from having to do the repetitious grunt work, which most of us hate,

I suppose one could call that sort of thing intellectual capital, of which all of us take advantage. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as that capital's origins and fundamentals are never forgotten.

 

There are, admittedly, fewer folks around who can do long division or square rooting by hand than there were a few hundred years ago, but so what?

We now have Charles Babbage's concepts and Alan Turing's insights and wonderful machines implemented in various electronic forms, which frees us from having to do the repetitious grunt work, which most of us hate,

Actually, that's a perfect case in point. When I was a senior undergraduate we had an in-class programming exercise on the 68HC11 in which we had to write assembly language routines to perform 32-bit by 32-bit multiplication and division. At the time I was three years older than most of my fellow classmates. Everyone that was my age or older completed the exercise in about ten minutes. Virtually none of the people that were straight out of high school and into college were able to. In working with them it became immediately apparent why -- none of them knew how to do long multiplication or division by hand. That lack of knowledge meant that they had no idea how to solve a trivially simple applied problem. That's the "so what".

Oh, and as it turned out (and I didn't track this down until several years later), that three year gap between me and them just happened to occur at the time when "technology in the classroom" got its big push as four-function calculators became cheap enough for classroom use. So the students just two years behind me had been using calculators from early elementary school -- and it crippled them. Imagine how even further lost they would have been had they had to teach a PIC16C62 how to do 24-bit multiplication and division when it didn't even know how to do an add-with-carry, let alone 8-bit multiplication or division. Yet that was exactly what I had to do as part of my very first contract after graduating.

 

Indeed.

 

Actually, that's a perfect case in point. When I was a senior undergraduate we had an in-class programming exercise on the 68HC11 in which we had to write assembly language routines to perform 32-bit by 32-bit multiplication and division. At the time I was three years older than most of my fellow classmates. Everyone that was my age or older completed the exercise in about ten minutes. Virtually none of the people that were straight out of high school and into college were able to. In working with them it became immediately apparent why -- none of them knew how to do long multiplication or division by hand. That lack of knowledge meant that they had no idea how to solve a trivially simple applied problem. That's the "so what".

Precisely my point,,which you

Oh, and as it turned out (and I didn't track this down until several years later), that three year gap between me and them just happened to occur at the time when "technology in the classroom" got its big push as four-function calculators became cheap enough for classroom use. So the students just two years behind me had been using calculators from early elementary school -- and it crippled them. Imagine how even further lost they would have been had they had to teach a PIC16C62 how to do 24-bit multiplication and division when it didn't even know how to do an add-with-carry, let alone 8-bit multiplication or division. Yet that was exactly what I had to do as part of my very first contract after graduating.

Actually, that's a perfect case in point. When I was a senior undergraduate we had an in-class programming exercise on the 68HC11 in which we had to write assembly language routines to perform 32-bit by 32-bit multiplication and division. At the time I was three years older than most of my fellow classmates. Everyone that was my age or older completed the exercise in about ten minutes. Virtually none of the people that were straight out of high school and into college were able to. In working with them it became immediately apparent why -- none of them knew how to do long multiplication or division by hand. That lack of knowledge meant that they had no idea how to solve a trivially simple applied problem. That's the "so what".

Oh, and as it turned out (and I didn't track this down until several years later), that three year gap between me and them just happened to occur at the time when "technology in the classroom" got its big push as four-function calculators became cheap enough for classroom use. So the students just two years behind me had been using calculators from early elementary school -- and it crippled them. Imagine how even further lost they would have been had they had to teach a PIC16C62 how to do 24-bit multiplication and division when it didn't even know how to do an add-with-carry, let alone 8-bit multiplication or division. Yet that was exactly what I had to do as part of my very first contract after graduating.

Leaving oput the