A few years ago I decided to build a decorative lamp for the living room. It was made out of scrounged parts from a glass bathroom fixture, and some pieces of scrap wood for the base. Very abstract, with seven glass tubes filled with cut crystal. But the cool part was what was underneath each tube was a circular array of multi-color LEDs that were daisy changed on a serial connection. From each light a 4-conductor cable lead down to some interface chips on a small prototyping PCB. That in turn was connected to ports on a small RISC-V computer. At 6pm it turns on, and for 4 hours runs an apparently random light show of slowly shifting colors, never the same way twice.
Part of the fun was learning about RISC-V and programming the whole thing, in assembly language. No device drivers, no operating system, no C++. Bare metal programming. But another part of the fun was soldering all those little interface chips, hex drivers, and so on. All the electronic parts came from AdaFruit except for the CPU board, which was a kit from SiFive.
I suppose it was the first time I used my EE knowledge in many decades. But I would not even have attempted the project without that background.
In an interview, Limor Fried, the owner and chief designer at AdaFruit, said "If there's one thing I'd like to see from this, it would be for some kids to say to themselves 'I could do that' and start the journey to becoming an engineer and entrepreneur."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
