blogahrah

This isn’t really a review, so ignore the title.  It’s just musings and thoughts.

I’ve been playing with a new toy.  I MEAN, A TOOL, NOT A TOY.  To engineers pretty much all tools are toys.  For work, I got a LeCroy Waverunner oscilloscope/logic analyzer.  It’s delicious.  Really.  Not only is it amazingly functional, but it’s aesthetically about as breathtaking as lab equipment gets.  Just look.  I’m already sidetracked though, because this isn’t the toy that I’m talking about.  Here’s a picture of the LeCroy unit anyway.  Why yes, the screen rotates into portrait mode to help you out when using it as a 32 channel logic analyzer…

What I meant to start talking about is the  Saleae Logic logic analyzer.  Hopefully, proper capitalization doesn’t confuse you regarding the name of the device and its function.  It’s about as sexy as a tiny USB analyzer can be.  It’s like a tiny Mac Mini, or Apple TV, in black, with one connection on each side.  Pictured is Logic16, which is the LARGE version.  Both the Logic and the Logic16 are pretty tiny.

Putting aside the fact that it works, the software is sleek, elegant, and intuitive.  At first, I was put off by the lack of menus, options, and configurability…and then I realized, it was in the Apple class of it just works*.  Disclaimer: I don’t like Apple, and I don’t feel for me that it just anythings.  The plan is to use it for some personal projects, but I brought it with me to work to check out some CANbus stuff, and see how the serial decoders work.  I just like calling it CAN, normally, but its really hard to google for the acronym Controller Area Network, because “can” is a pretty common word.  So, you’re welcome, googlers, for helping you get here.

I was overwhelmed with sadness when the unit initially would not read or decode anything on CAN bus.  So much for just working.  But, fear not oh ye will vote for me in the 2028 presidential election…Saleae seems to love open source, so I downloaded the source for their CAN serial analyzer.  Within a few minutes, I found that my data stream was inverted from typical applications…something I’ve known for awhile, but always basically ignored.  My setup is nonstandard, and Saleaa’s analyzer had it the typical way.

Not only was the source available to me, they also provide clear instructions for setting up and compiling with a ready-made Visual Studio project.   In under an hour, I had edited the source and recompiled for my particular application.

This was a triumph of open source.  It was great to be able to quickly and easily modify their application to suit my needs.  Customer service is quick and knowledgeable…alright, customer service is mostly the engineers who designed it.  It’s a big plus in my book.

Bottom line; if you are looking for an inexpensive hobbiest analyzer, pick up a Saleae Logic for $150-ish.  Do it.  If your budget is more in the $15,000 range, I’d suggest a tricked out Lecroy Waverunner.

Everyone once in awhile, I’ll smile a lot at what the internet enables.  A few similar things have happened before, but the latest one is personally the most moving.  The picture below is a snippet from the Kickstarter page.  Kickstarter is a crowd-source funding platform.  If you want to, say, make a documentary on lemmings, you can post a project and dollar amount you need to start, and individuals/whoever pledges to donate in whatever amount they see fit.  This allows the general internet public to decide on projects they feel worthy, and fund them.  There’s some art projects, media, hardware…lots of interesting, boring, great projects.  I’m not 100% sure of all the details, but if your goal is not hit, then everyone’s money gets returned.  If you need $50k to fund your lemming film endeavour, and you only get $10k in donations…those people haven’t lost anything, and only cough up the dough if the project hits their goal within a deadline period.

Anyway, this is it:

I know, those of you voting for me in the 2024 elections may be unfamiliar with the words described above.  In less than 24 hours, the internet community contributed more than $1 million dollars to fund a developer with a history of fantastic games.  So what?  This is what.

Games need developers, publishers, distributors, all of these things.  And when a brilliant (and sometimes not brilliant) development studio wants to make a game, someone needs to pony up the dough.  More and more often, a big studio like EA (Electronic Arts), Activision, etc will fund them…but having the wallet means you can dictate some of the process of development.  Furthermore, just like recording artists get screwed by their production companies, development studios can see very little return while their publisher rakes in the dough from a successful game.

Something like Kickstarter allows this model to be circumvented.  People can choose who to support, donate directly, the developers can work on their art in a much purer sense.

Another example of this is Louis C.K.  Instead of going through the usual channels, he self-produced a comedy album (is it called a comedy album?), and distributed it online for $5.  He’s well known and popular enough for the internet to take of the marketing for him…but cutting out the middleman allowed a lot of dollars not to be burned doing nothing.  I understand this is a poor way to “stimulate the economy”…but really, it’s a much more efficient way of working in the internet age.  If his experiment failed, the studios could point and laugh…but he made over a million dollars.  I’m not here to toot anyone’s horn, but he donated nearly $300k of this to charities.  I don’t see publishers giving away 30% of their profits.

I’m not saying everyone has the capabilities to produce things themselves, but the big media companies are becoming increasingly obsolete.  Services like Pandora and Spotify make music free/inexpensive, which cuts into the big studio’s profits.

Keep being independent.  Keep crowd-sourcing funding when necessary, and pour back whatever profits you can back into the community.

What I’m saying, dear 2024 election voter, is that I believe the big studios are wasteful, and corrupt their art, whether it be music, video, games, or other things that I can’t think of right now.  I’m sure this effects books and physical media (painting and such) as well, but nobody looks at art anymore, and only girls read books…and only Vaginal Fantasy Novels.