Comment on Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks agoThe difference in what can be done and the amount of work that needs to go into it between discrete digital electronics and just having a microcontroller there is HUGE.
Also with microcontrollers and microprocessors most of the work moves from Electronics Engineering and circuit-design space to Software Engineering and software development, and the latter experts are easier to find plus the development cycle is way more friendly when it’s just code which you can change and upload at will rather than physical circuits.
Even more entertaining, microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap (the most basic ones cost a few cents) that throwing in a microcontroller is almost always significantly cheaper than doing the control stuff with discrete electronics.
I actually got an EE degree back when we embedded circuits were just starting to be used so I didn’t really get taught how to use them, then went for a career in software instead of electronics and came back to digital electronics years later and it’s like night and day between the discrete digital electronics age and the everything is a computing device era.
0x0@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
You’re forgetting the main driving factor behind being able to personalize a screen vs a plastic label: advertising.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
What I describe goes well beyond things with screens.
For example computer mice have a microcontroller inside (and unless it serves a mechanical function, not much more than that) and cars have several, only one of which actual handles a proper screen (it’s actually a microprocessor rather than a mere microcontroller).
The simplest microcontrollers have nowhere near enough memory to handle any half-way decent display (some nothing at all, some can just about handle a two-tone 320x200 display over I2C or SPI, some can handle 640x480 16-bit RGB but without animations as they don’t have enough memory to actual have a buffer for image composition) and yet they keep getting sold in massive numbers.
Pretty much all digital electronics out there no matter how invisible to users has been replaced by embedded microcontrollers or, in a some use cases, single function controllers (which are basically microcontroller programs converted into integrated circuits).
Embedded computing was a massive revolution in digital electronics.