You need to do mid-frame tile updates just to show a full bitmap frame. There’s 360 8x8 tiles on the screen, but the tile indices are 8 bit (you can only reference 256 tiles). You can store only 384 tiles in VRAM - a bit more than a full screen. So the mid-screen update is to go from one tile dictionary to the other, so you can access 360 tiles in total.
You can update 1 tile per scan line (during hblank), so 154 tiles per frame (including 10 vblank scanlines). So you need 2.5 frames to replace all tiles.
If you are really smart about updates, you can “race the beam”, basically start updating tiles just as the frame starts rendering, just behind the active scan line. Then you can update maybe 280 tiles before the active scan line of the next frame catches up with you.
Nice! I'm doing the same. 9 months in. Everything you said is on the frickin' money. Every. single. word. Canada Dry Zero is my new "thing". That "thing" by the way, is the dopamine reward.
This has an advantage that the board itself is printed.
After molding and firing (say) 50 of them, those that survive will all look and work about the same. Painting the conductive traces into the printed pathways is an easy thing to get right. And then the parts are soldered on, which is also easy to get right.
The design and the pathways are predefined, and then mechanically copied (printed) over and over.
This reduces the skill required for final assembly.
Wire-wrap and point-to-point methods certainly also work, but they come with increased potential for errors at assembly so getting them right tends to require more skill. Reducing assembly skill is part of how PCBs became commonplace to begin with.
And those other methods still generally want a board of some kind to mount stuff to, anyway, just for practical handling and durability reasons. It might be a perfboard. It might also be a chunk of scrap wood from the shed (we can even add nails and Fahnestock clips to it for fixturing and connectivity!). Whatever it is, it probably still resembles a board.
But with this clay method, the provision of that board is inherent in the process. That has a distinct bit of elegance to it.
(And if we cast all logic and reason aside, then remember: This is supposed to be art. It's OK that different methods of circuit assembly exist, and it's even OK if some or all of them are better in some way.)
An empty head is not the same as an open mind. There is no idea to shoot down here.
You invoked BGA to criticize point-to-point.
Invoking BGA in this context is invalid unless you can explain how this art project process could ever handle BGA. Which you have yet to do.
You suggest that shooting down ideas isn't productive.
What an interesting argument to present, while not only "shooting down" an idea yourself, but shooting it down as unworkable after it has actually already worked for decades, generations, for jobs of the same complexity as this post.
Can you please stop posting so aggressively and breaking the site guidelines? You've done it repeatedly in this thread and we're trying for something else here.
If you don't find the current post/comments gratifying of your intellectual curiosity, there are 29 other threads on the frontpage, and if none of those are of interest, you're certain to find something interesting at https://news.ycombinator.com/front and the links back from there.
I can easily explain how this art process could handle BGAs. As mentioned in the article, you could swap the indentation+hand-painted circuit traces with screen-printed traces on a flat surface.
Defending one idea isn’t shooting down another. Point to point wiring has its uses, for sure. But calling it an “idiotic ash tray of clay and paint” is shooting something down. But again, i think you’re conflating me with an earlier commenter.
I don't know about anyone else you might possibly be referring to, but I can say in my case I said it's worthless and stupid, I did not say I hate it or that it makes me angry.
"It's interesting" how some people can only interpret that as anger, or are willing to put their own words into someone else's mouth and then hold against them something they never said, while in the very act of critiquing them for lack of civilized behavior. I mean dude... chef's kiss.
A thing can simply be recognized and dumb and nothing more to it than that.
The only reason it's even worth saying is not actually just because a dumb thing exists, but because the dumb thing does not do what it purports to do that's all. This is not in fact an alternative to PCBs, nor even a path to eventually being one. We have had electronics on all manner of substrates including ceramics since forever, so I'm not merely saying that you can't put traces on ceramics. I'm saying this project as presented makes no sense. It's just a silly idea that doesn't actually provide enough function or value to be worth the materials.
It doesn't hurt anyone, and so there is nothing there to hate, merely dismiss.
"It's interesting" how angry pointing this out makes some people.
Let me guess the next question if I may be so bold: "Why go out of your way to say anything instead of just ignoring?"
Glad you asked ;) Why didn't the authors of this web page simply do their project without saying anything? They actively published their idea. I didn't go put a spy camera in their back yard and and then tell the world "hey look how dumb this is." They, of their own volition, went out of their way to actively tell the world "Hey look at what I did." I didn't even post it to HN here. It just turned up and was presented to me. Well I did look as they asked. And then I said what my asessment of what they showed. I didn't have to reply, but the authors diodn't have to publish either.
And still even this reaction to your comment (which is it's own seperate thing from the reaction to the original post) isn't anger. It is critique, bordering on ridicule by pointing out just how many different ways the remark doesn't hold water, but I didn't make the argument or the holes in it. As with the original post, it does not require anger to observe that something is dumb, nor even to say that you observe that it's dumb.
I can also implement compliant IEEE 754 floating point arithmetic, with all rounding modes and exceptions, in Conway’s Game of Life, and I can implement that on a Turing machine and emulate that Turing machine in Brainfuck. This does not mean it’s sensible — it would be a serious engineering project that should be decomposed, built in pieces, and tested or verified in pieces. Which even a Chinese LLM ought to be able to do in an appropriate environment with appropriate resources and an appropriate prompt.
But that is not what this is testing. And I’m not even sure which number system the mentioned roots of unity are in. Maybe it’s supposed to be generic over number systems in a delightfully untyped lambda calculus sort of way?
edit: after pasting the entire problem including the solution, ChatGPT is able to explain “GN numbers”. I suspect its explanation is sort of correct. But I get no web search results for GN numbers and I can’t really tell whether ChatGPT is giving a semi-hallucinated description or figuring it out from the problem and its solution or what.
We must have a very different view of the world because in my neck of the woods companies are desperate for senior talent. And it's become even harder to find seniors now that everyone has access to a machine that can create the appearance of experience.
Replicad is designed primarily to be used as a library with the web editor as a helper.
FluidCAD is designed to be used as full CAD package code + UI. I've outlined some of my motives in recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721997
I am quite happy for anyone to use whatever tools they find to be good. I'm also happy for anyone to use jj with whatever server they want to.
It is right to be skeptical of me, but I hope to keep that integrity by continuing to talk about things that I believe are legitimately good, regardless of anything else.
Thanks for the reply Steve - I think it's only natural, and charitably unintentional :) But almost everything I've seen upvoted around the Internet from you has been about jj and being directly tied to east river source control... I think that's a reasonable framing. I can only hope me signalling this maybe changes something. While I'm not a fan of jj (I'd much rather Pijul were to eat the world), I think you as a person is really nice and always have been "for the community", but I can't shake this current framing!
You can't say it's adjacent to it, when your job directly involves the technology. You'd stop posting because anything you say about jj could be interpreted as a sales pitch for jj, and a lot of people can be turned off by that. That's one reason. Our lack of creativity is not proof of no more.
But I don't think "stop writing" is the only strategy to jump on...
Or maybe I'm just extremely unlucky to have only caught these kinds of posts and gained this framing! Totally possible.
or the top 1% of value holders means your connection to other holders is vastly smaller than the other 99%. also highly likely to get cancer no matter who you are. i think the odds are better than people think, was just a matter of time
regardless of that observation: i am glad it's good people working with good people on these problems!
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