I'm taking a break from web apps for a while. It seems like web development continues to walk deeper into the woods. More complex frameworks and libraries that supposedly make things easier but march further away from HTML, CSS, and JS basics. The dependency base is so thick now that your code is mostly someone else's. You really don't know if your aiding and abetting the enemy with embedded spyware or setting yourself up for revision hell.

Hardware continues to march along as well. The new Pi Pico for example. It has five varieties already! Here's a link to its data sheet. With its simplicity comes its complexity - C/C++. Yep, the real stuff. You're gonna have to learn the Mother-Language not candy wrapped like the Arduino. The spec for this little beast is done professionally with loads of techie charts and graphs, opcode listings and 50 shades of hardware heaven. The spec for the new process (RP2040) is 647 pages long. So there's lots of things to do. No boring samo-samo in the hardware world.

I, on the other hand, am still stuck at the beginning of this decade working with Arduino's and TTL logic chips. I added a new/old project in the next section that digs into how to manage software scheduling for an interrupt driven case. If you want to get stuck into learning more about C++ now, pop open one of the libraries in your Arduino list and see how they built the .h and .cpp files.

Another awesome area for hardware projects is video surveillance. Check out motionEyeOS. It can be loaded onto several microcontrollers but the Raspberry-Pi is a good one since is has a camera hookup. The latest Pi also makes a great network server as well. Using the new Pico and a sensor checker and Pi-4 as the Mothership, there is a world of new possibilities. When did it happen that hobbyists have to have a degree in Computer Science just open a kit and build something?

I hope to bring you something in the Project area soon concerning cryptology. There is a lot of fascinating history and progress all to be thwarted by quantum processors, but that's not too soon, maybe. I build a Linear Feedback Shift Register a few years ago to encript data, but there's a lot more too adding an LFSR into a data system such as data synchronization, phase lock loops, and clocking systems, all of which make for great projects.