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                      JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 26TH JUNE, 2016
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SUBJECT: Musing & muttering
   DATE: Sun 26 Jun 22:37:31 BST 2016

So much for being back on task :( For quite a while now I've not been well. My
medication has been changed and is really screwing me up. Most worrying has
been the effect on my fine motor control skills. My typing has been way off
and I keep either hitting the wrong keys or hitting the right keys in the
wrong order. For someone like me who lives and breaths programming it's not
good.

I have managed some work on WolfMUD, which while I'm not 100% happy with I've
pushed out to the public dev branch. It's mostly more cleaning up of the code.
I've also switched to the go1.7beta2 release and not had any issues.

I've had another (nice) distraction - even though I said I was going to try
and avoid more distractions. Last weekend was Father's day and my daughter got
me a tiny Arduino Micro - actually a Genuino Micro as I'm outside the USA.

Usually when I play with small systems they are ARM based. The Arduino Micro
is based on an Atmel ATmega32u4 microcontroller: 8bit processor running at
16MHz with 32k flash (4k used by the bootloader) and 2.5k RAM. I've found
working with it very nostalgic as it reminds me of where computers started for
me - with the BBC Micro. The BBC Micro has influenced me more than any other
computer - ever.

There is no operating system on the Arduino. Just your code on the bare metal.
So far I have been playing with the Arduino IDE (Java based) and sketches.
I've also started looking at using C directly via gcc-avr. What I really want
to get into is assembler on the microcontroller :)

Something that the BBC micro taught me, and something that has always remained
with me, is how to write tight, efficient code. I don't know why I haven't
played with microcontrollers before as they seem to be a perfect fit for me
and my specific skills.

I've also looking at even smaller boards using the ATTiny85 microcontroller as
well: 8bit processor running at 8Mhz, 8k flash (2.75k used by the bootloader),
512 bytes of RAM :D

Would WolfMUD run on these dinky systems? Well Wolf (single player) would
easily run on one. WolfMUD? possibly... maybe by having a microcontroller per
client and the microcontrollers were hooked up itogether using the I2C bus?

--
Diddymus


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