It seems that the visual scheme I chose for the blog isn’t the most intuitive. To see comments on a post , you must click on the title to display the post and comments. Check out the posts on Brainfuck and Brainfuino especially.

Posting drafts that have been lying around too long, maybe you will find them useful.

Well, I went out on a limb and bought a book with the title “Data Science From Scratch” by Ramon Base. It’s a 155 page brief overview of the challenges of learning data science. And I’m being generous to say it’s 155 pages as the typeface is huge and the text is set doublespaced , so it’s really about a 50-70 page book.

A better use of your time is the rather extensive course at https://applieddatascience.cmp.uea.ac.uk/01/1/ch1_intro.html. It’s aimed at older students or at least, more advanced 13-14 year olds, since it’s aimed at college students from what I can tell.

I found this site to be a useful brainfuck resource: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck. But beware, the site only seems to be sporadically available, with lots of 500 error codes generated by web pages accesses.

Yes, the website name implies we mostly do object oriented programming, but that hasn’t been the only paradigm that we work in. I first started playing with Clojure around 2011, and now work in Scala, and Haskell too. Scala and Clojure mostly run on top of the JVM, so it behooves you to have an updated JVM.

Still working sporadically on the Brainfuck app which will eventually end up on one of the Brainfuino hardware devices I bought from Matthew. It’s slow going coding the Brainfuck language and I always seem to get sidetracked trying to learn a language the makes Assembly language seem high level.

I got my artsy itch out of my system, I’ve spent the day creating some music, but I can’t record it because, once again, I’ve lost track of my portable Zoom H8 digital recorder and my notebook to log what I’ve done to create the piece.

I also did some prep work on some paintings I want to do instead of waiting for nightfall when there are fewer bugs to get stuck in the paint. Yeah, I paint out-of-doors. It was a lovely, not too warm day.

But the real work will be to make progress coding the Brainfuck app that I want to run on my newest acquisition, 2 Brainfuinos. Supposedly I’ll be able to run Arduino type apps on the Brainfuino. It’s a little tedious coding Brainfuck apps, but if I can get something useful to run, my creative urges will be satisfied. Because the Brainfuino doesn’t have the exact pin layout as the Arduino Uno, using commercially available hats is out if the question. Well, off to cook some dinner, then get down to business.

I didn’t really get into in the last post, but the Brainfuino implements the brainfuck language in a FPGA platform emulating an Arduino Uno (sort of). Here’s a picture of what I received in the mail:

The instructions I received are somewhat minimalist, two sides of a single sheet of paper.

The terminal you use to interface with the Brainfuino is recommended on Winblows to be PuTTY, but since I interface with a Rapsberry Pi, two programs seem to be the options available. Both are installed with apt get and the programs are minicom and gtkterm. I’ve used GTKTerm and it seems to do the trick.

Some of the instructions are non-starters because you must dismantle the case to access the reset button, and I don’t have a 2mm hex key handy, that I know of.

I haven’t done much programming on the Brainfuino, as I’m still developing the software and it’s easier to develop using the tool at monocalc.com: https://monocalc.com/tool/programming/brainfuck_interpreter. More info is available about brainfuck, just use your browser. Here’s DuckDuckGo’s web page on brainfuck:

Oh, and I don’t think you’re going to find out too much about the Brainfuino, DuckDuckGo’s page is here:

I’ll look up the web info in my browser tabs and post it here, or you can use the email addresses in the docs above. The web site for the current build of the Brainfuino is https://lectronz.com/products/brainfuinov1-1.

I heard about the Brainfuino from a post Thalia made on the fediverse. My handle on the fediverse is @jaypeach53. Yeah, not a tech site, but on the fediverse you can talk to the whole fediverse from any instance.

As the github site (https://github.com/kuashio/bf) says:

This product is intended as anything around brainfuck and esoteric programming languages: A joke. An elaborate joke. A geek toy.

I don’t really consider it to be a toy. Arduinos are limited devices, them being microcontrollers, not the run-of-the-mill CPUs. And they can have their uses. Dozens of devices around your home are controlled by microcontrollers. One example off the top of my head is the brain of the sprinkler controller.

I used to program in assembler, so brainfuck as a language really isn’t that foreign. So using what’s essentially an assembly language is just reawakening a dormant memory. Yeah, it’s far different than coding in a language that does much handholding, but you get used to it.

Well, after a few months, I got some time to work on the 2 Odroid XU-4 that I bought. They have a choice of Linux or Android operating systems which you can install. I chose : Ubuntu 18.04.

The documentation only has instructions for installing on Windows or Mac. But I looked on the internet for instructions to use the dd command in Linux to flash the OS onto the SD card.

More to come…

Here’s an updated downloads page for the XU-4

Looks like it’s time to update the OS.