Every day there is some new platform popping up.
Is quite difficult to stay updated unless you have to do that for work.
Even if the prices are dropped a lot, if you want to experiment with everything is coming out it requires a lot of money and time.
Look only for example to the famous Arduino platform. It become a universe of different boards and choices !
To understand the entire ecosystem you need to spend hours and hours reading material, often not even updated !
I had some Arduino boards for quite some time now, didn't really did much with them.
Still I managed to have two or three different Arduino boards ended up in my drawer.
To test a RGB LED strip I just resumed one of them.
In theory a 5 minutes job, fire up Arduino, install a demo library and go.
It took about an hour only to have the environment running properly.
Updates, permissions to be set up on the system, etc.
Then problems because the board I had here were old and of course they changed everything to support mainly the new ones.
Same problems with Energia (the TI answer to Arduino).
I have many old projects based on Energia, but the latest IDE has problems on some platforms.
On my Mac the latest version doesn't work, update Java, install that, remove that ... hours spent for nothing.
And then so many other things that would be interesting to explore.
ST processors, Beagle board, Raspberry Pi in many different forms, TI platforms, ACR platforms ... easily we arrive to have to install dozens of totally different IDE, for different platforms, for different boards on different machines with different OS.
It become a job only tracking all the new things popping up every day !
Developing today is a job divided in two main tasks :
- Development environment
- acquire a specific IDE/development environment
- install it
- learn how to use it
- Develop the project
Developing the project, the actual real "task", become often less important than learn and understand how to have a specific IDE/Development environment installed on a machine.
And this make me miss the "old time" where did you start to use a platform, did learn all about it and then use it for years producing actually things.
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