There was something about typing out commands on a keyboard and sending them to a 7-segment LED array that you wired up yourself, that isn't really comparable to an Arduino.

So don't use an Arduino if that makes it too easy. Get yerself an FTDI USB-to-parallel module (http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Modules/DevelopmentModules....) and set it to bit-bang mode, and away you go.

Edit: Or get something from a different vendor, since as mentioned below, FTDI now has a track record of punishing their legit customers for the existence of knockoff chips.

> USB-to-parallel module

Those have awful latency so bitbanging is less efficient.

> FTDI now has a track record of punishing their legit customers for the existence of knockoff chips.

At least they only bricked the knockoffs.

Prolific simply disabled support for their older, widely counterfeited PL2303HXA chips in Windows 8+. The same driver binary loaded under W7 still supports them.

> At least they only bricked the knockoffs.

As opposed to what? Making them burst into flames in the hope of burning the person's house down? Bricking is pretty much the worst thing you can do.

As opposed to disabling the knockoffs and genuine chips.

Sorry for the confusion. I noticed that English speakers place "only" before the verb in such sentences and I'm monkeying them even though it doesn't make sense to me either ;)

Nah, what you said made sense, I initially read it the way you meant it, but it is ambiguous enough to read either way.

Or that the joystick ports on the Atari 400/800 were actually bidirectional and you could get a speech synth chip at radio shack and wire it up that way...

I used the bidirectional ports on the Atari 800 and C64 to cross compile for C64 because The Atari Macro Assembler was much better than anything on the C64 at the time :P

Another common use for those in the days before every modem had an auto-answer mode was to hook up a "ring detector". The ring detector would send a 5v pulse into the joystick port when the phone rang, then the BBS or terminal software would issue the necessary commands to tell the modem to answer.

My MBED has a USB port so I can use a keyboard on it. Or a ethernet.

So many to choose from

https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/

There's still a niche for interactive hackable systems that's not really filled.

Doesn't a Raspberry Pi fill this void? Cheap, interactive GUI, and a GPIO header exposed right on the PCB.

An arduino is not interactive the way a personal computer is.

What kind of interactivity do you miss?

Plugging it in USB and using like a GPIO is there. Two way communication is there.

The ability to poke at hardware from the command prompt and easy integration of text or graphical user interface. The difference is between "my computer has a port" and "this external device has a port."

So, you mean using it like a GPIO? It's there. All it requires is loading a GPIO firmware.

Huh, so what's a good and featureful GPIO firmware? I did some searching, but it's a little hard to search for.

"Arduino as GPIO" on google leads to this:

https://github.com/BLavery/virtual-GPIO

Looks like it's become the "mainstream" implementation since last time I looked.

Honestly, I don't see much gain in using something like this in "production". After you hack something together, carrying a PC around with it isn't comfortable[1]. It may be useful for prototyping, but the arduino IDE is pretty good by itself. I have never actually needed a GPIO firmware. But it's there.

[1] In my 3D printer, that I really couldn't get away with it, I plugged a rPI with a wifi module so it can stay far away. I have a project where I will need a PCIe bus, this one bothers me.

Oh, that's a nicer one than the others I found. I see that sort of thing as being useful in situations where the PC is required anyway, like a lot of automated lab setups. You need the PC for data acquisition and analysis, and it's nice if you can control the rest of the equipment from the same program. I've used Measurement Computing's digital IO and data acquisition boards for that sort of thing.

Having a separate microcontroller has its uses too, of course. Like you said, it certainly packages smaller. Plus, you can get much more reliable timing. I'm currently helping a friend with an antenna rotator project, and that requires some brains right at the motor/encoder unit. For that I've written some software to reliably send control data packets back and forth, which is necessary but adds quite a bit of complexity.

Plus, in that timeframe, FPGAs have become much cheaper and more powerful, providing tinkerers a step up from bitbanging.

Bitbanging was part of the fun. That's kinda the point most are making here.

Bitbanging hasn't gone away. If you want to write assembler on an 8-bit micro, you can do it on a $4 dev board. That board can run on AA batteries and be embedded into other projects. If you want to spin your own boards, you can get 10cm*10cm boards from China for less than a dollar.

We are living in a golden age of hardware hacking. Modern computers aren't particularly amiable to bare-metal programming, but we have truly incredible microcontrollers available at very low cost. We also have excellent gratis and libre toolchains for microcontroller development.

Once you have a little experience working with microcontrollers, you realise the incredible possibilities available to us today. The ZX Spectrums and C64s we loved haven't gone away, they've just turned into tiny chips that cost less than a newspaper.

Indeed:

> I made a PCB that fits into a standard D-Sub 25 connector housing with a micro USB port where the cable usually comes out

This. My recent encounter in this space was a Nordic NRF51822 BLE chip bought as a 3$ breakout board from Aliexpress, wiring it via STM32 and compiling it using GCC and MBED ...and skipping over the expensive official compiler.

The future is mobile!