Schlagwort: forum

  • The Arduino Forum is now completely renovated (and it’s so nice)

    The Arduino Forum is now completely renovated (and it’s so nice)

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Arduino TeamApril 13th, 2021

    It was a long Monday with the Arduino forum closed for maintenance, wasn’t it? Many people had to hold back their Arduino-related questions for an entire day… panic! But before getting mad at us, read on and you’ll understand it was for an extremely good cause. 😉

    We migrated the forum to a new, modern, platform which provides a dramatically improved user experience. Try it now at forum.arduino.cc! It’s fast, clean, practical, and mobile-friendly. The new interface helps focus on contents, share knowledge and generate quality interactions between people.

    New Forum Features

    • No more pages to browse manually.
    • Long conversations are loaded dynamically while scrolling.
    • Notifications are shown when someone mentions you or replies to your posts.
    • Links are expanded with previews.
    • Long conversations are automatically summarized.
    • Trust levels and other tools help fight spamming and encourage good behaviors.

    And there’s a lot more!

    The new forum is built on Discourse, which is the leading forum platform and is 100% open source. This makes the Arduino forum into one of the largest Discourse forums in the world, with over one million users and more than five million posts. We partnered with the Discourse team to perform this long and complex migration. It was great to collaborate with people who believe in quality, human-centric software and open source as much as we do.

    A big thank you also goes out to all the volunteer moderators who help newcomers and keep things in order. They do an incredible job.

    Spending time in the forum, reading conversations and answering questions is a great learning opportunity. Join the Arduino community now!

    Forum Notes

    User images (avatars) won’t be visible for a few hours because they’re being imported. There’s also some minor formatting in posts that hasn’t been applied yet, like emoticons and underlined text. There’s a job running in the background job which is working on things. Everything will appear automatically as soon as the process is complete. But we wanted to reopen the forum as soon as possible.

    These are the most important things you need to know if you’re used to the old forum:

    • It automatically saves drafts while you’re typing.
    • The “Add Karma” button is not there any more because we now have message likes. If you want to show your appreciation, click the “Like” icon under a post.
    • The “Flag” button replaces the “Report to moderator” link.
    • You can configure your notification preferences on a per-category or per-topic basis by clicking the bell icon at the top-right.
    • There’s no “Print” button any more. A printer-friendly rendering is created when you print from your browser.
    • You can now bookmark your favorite posts. Click the avatar in the top right to access your bookmarks, notifications, mentions and history.

    Should you notice issues with the new forum, let us know.

    Website: LINK

  • April 12th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

    April 12th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

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    April 12th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

    Arduino TeamApril 9th, 2021

    Arduino forum maintenance

    Don’t worry if you’re unable to access certain areas of the Arduino website next Monday (April 12th). We’re carrying out some scheduled maintenance to bring you a few exciting new features.

    Primarily we’re updating the forum platform. This is a project we’ve been planning for a while, especially since the forums are getting so busy. The current system has served us well over the years, but it’s time for an upgrade.

    Areas Affected by Scheduled Maintenance

    • The Arduino Forum will be offline for the entire day as it’s migrated to the new platform.

    In order to take the community to the next level, we’re moving over to Discourse. This will give you a vastly improved user experience, a better interface and a lot more options for editing and formatting your posts. It was a pretty easy choice for Arduino, since Discourse is very well established, robust, and it’s also open source. As you know, this is a philosophy that’s at the core of everything Arduino, so it was important for us to choose a forum platform that has similar values.

    Once we’ve moved everything over to Discourse and your new forum is up and running, we’ll give you lots more info on all the great new features and functions. Until then, please bear with us as the changes and upgrades are carried out.

    Website: LINK

  • April 6th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

    April 6th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

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    April 6th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website

    Arduino TeamApril 2nd, 2021

    Some areas of the Arduino website will be temporarily unavailable on Tuesday, April 6th.

    Don’t worry if you’re unable to access certain areas of the Arduino website next Tuesday. We’re carrying out some scheduled maintenance to bring you a few exciting new features.

    Areas Affected by Maintenance

    • Login will be offline between 7am and 10am CET (any service requiring login like Arduino Store, Create Editor and IoT Cloud are impacted).

    Other Arduino services might also experience a reduced performance during the day, as part of the maintenance work.

    Website: LINK

  • Historical high-resolution graphics on Raspberry Pi

    Historical high-resolution graphics on Raspberry Pi

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Raspberry Pi Trading engineer James Hughes recently pointed out a project to us that he’d found on the Raspberry Pi forum. Using a Raspberry Pi, forum member Rene Richarz has written a Tektronix 4010, 4013, 4014, 4015, and ARDS terminal emulator. The project sounded cool, but Helen and I didn’t 100% get it, so we asked James to write an introduction for us. You can find that below, followed by the project itself. James’s intro is amazing, because, despite this heat messing with my concentration, I understand the project now! That James – what a treasure. And here he is:

    Those of a certain age will remember the vector graphics display of arcade games like Battlezone and Asteroids, and the subsequent colour displays of Star Wars and Tempest. Even earlier than these games came the less sophisticated Tektronic storage tube terminals used by the pioneers of computer graphics, combined with the PDP-11s and Vax’s that were the staple of computer graphics labs of the era.

    Unlike the raster displays that everyone uses now, these terminals used a steerable electron beam (the ‘write gun’) to draw lines directly on the phosphor of the monitor, which were kept illuminated by a secondary ‘flood gun’. These devices had very high resolution, up to 1024×1024 pixels, but the big problem was that you could not erase just a bit of the display — you had to erase the whole image!

    Rene Richarz’s project emulates these fascinating old displays, even down to the speed of drawing: because the display needed to be charged, the electron gun could only travel at a limited speed of 1500–4000 vector inches/second!

    Once memory prices started dropping, the cost of raster displays also dropped significantly, meaning these early computer graphics vector displays were consigned to the annals of history. But their memory lives on, not only in the project we see here but in many of the algorithms and techniques developed in those early years that are still used today.

    PiDP-11 with tek4010 Tektronix 4014 emulator

    This video shows the blinking PiDP-11 (https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence) running the historical 2.11 BSD Unix (https://github.com/rricharz/pidp11-2.11bsd) with the Tektronix 4014 emulator tek4010 (https://github.com/rricharz/Tek4010). Late 1970s Blinkenlight action and storage tube display action.

    As Rene explains on the GitHub repo, his project “makes an effort to emulate the storage tube display of the Tektronix 4010, including the bright drawing spot. It can be used to log into a historical Unix system such as 2.11 BSD on the PiDP-11 or a real historical system. It can also be used to display historical plot data.”

    You can see more information on the project, and join in the community discussion, on our forum, and find all the relevant code and instructions for creating your own on GitHub. And if you’d like a primer on how the bistable storage CRTs that Rene is emulating work, you could do worse than take a look at how Tektronix explained it to their customers in the July 1972 issue of Tekscope magazine.

    We’ll close with this underappreciated reflection on the virtues of vector displays:

    Yes raster is faster, but raster is vaster, and vector just seems more correcter.
    Reproduced from old.carto.net; attributed to Dana Tomlin, 1990

    Website: LINK