Overdue ramblings and link dumps

Mon Mar 06 2006 23:09:57 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

The Cypress PSoC products seem pretty cool, and I have an interest in toying with them after checking out a project called GAINER and reading some stuff in Circuit Cellar. After a fair amount of research, it seems there is zero Linux support for developing those guys. What crap. I know I'm in an OS minority, and I know there are going to be hassles such as this that go with the territory. That's fine...whatever. It's just unfortunate. Instead of just being able to buy a dev kit and start working with low-price hardware, I would have to buy a $200 operating system that I don't want in the first place. I wonder if the dsPIC line from Microchip can be developed using Linux? I've been meaning to look into those. At present, it seems that PICs or Atmel devices are the way to go when doing micro* stuff with Linux...although it would be nice to have better support. Apparently very similar to GAINER is the Arduino project. There's a USB version readily available for $30, but look at the part count comparison between the two! I haven't tried it out yet, but the kinda cool thing about Arduion is that they have their own little IDE (granted, I now assume that every IDE should be an Eclipse project. Although he's been gone for nearly a year now, you can read some about Koji Tano and download the 10-CD tribute album for free. I've been eyeballing the Sound Lab Synth for a bit now and might just have to build one. The page layout leaves something to be desired, but the sounds are damn fantastic. Stacy and I quit smoking about 7 weeks ago now. Been going well so far, thanks to the patch. I've been doing Bikram Yoga 2-3 times a week to help with the quitting plan and improving my general health. It's very weird, but very good.