Posts by Andrew 1234

Europe to upgrade its continental GPS

Re: "It seems odd to me that GPS et al aren't accurate to the inch. "

John Smith - I think you mean WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System). That's the US equivalent of EGNOS, just about all consumer GPS systems have it for no extra cost and on a good day it gives you 1 m accuracy. They are both a type of SBAS (Space based augmentation systems).

A high end RTK GPS will give you 1 cm accuracy. A good RTK system is getting into the >$10,000 price range.

Self-driving Google car T-boned in California crash

Re: This is a dangerous street

They are in mountain view, Unless you take the freeway or expressway you are going to take El Camino to get virtually anywhere. And given the nature of that road you're going to get people running lights or turning in odd and unexpected ways.

BBC's micro:bit retail shipments near

Re: Now we have Pi Zero

It's a very different animal to a Pi.

This is a bare metal embedded system rather than a stripped down linux computer.

Sure if you use graphical programming systems then they are much the same but if you program it in c (the libraries for that have been out for 6 months) then the interrupt response time is orders of magnitude faster than the Pi could dream of.

Plus you have all the fun of being able to poke individual CPU registers and play with every possible setting. Try doing that under Linux.

Most students won't ever get past running the pre-written stuff they are spoon fed. But just like the BBC micro in it's day there is a whole world more for those who want to dig.

Back in my school days I was writing programs in 6502 assembler on the BBC. Oh the fun I could have had with half a dozen of these back then.