[sdiy] 4-bit encoder?

[Roman Sowa]

It's one of those few occasions when everybody has different opinion and 
at the same time everybody is right.

1. Making David's project with a micro or FPGA seems so obvious, and 
probably the easiest way.
2. If something with any kind of firmware in it will break in 40 years, 
there will be some clever geek around (not born today yet) who will not 
worry about vintage chips but make functional replacement using 
40-years-into-the-future technology.
3. If David has a choice to do it with 40 chips and it makes him happy, 
then I can fully understand it, maybe even admire it.

My plan for retirement is to make a polsynth with patch memory and all 
bells and whistles not using a single line of code. No micros, no FPGAs, 
just plain logic and analog chips. Now try to change my mind.

Roman

W dniu 2020-10-13 o 13:57, john slee pisze:
> It is a weird choice of hill to die on.
> 
> 8051 and Z80 are both 40+ years old and very much alive in 2020. PIC and 
> AVR families are, according to Wikipedia, 20+ years old, with PIC's 
> origins being much older.
> 
> And really the requirement when replacing a microcontroller isn't that 
> the replacement is identical; the requirement is that it operates 
> identically. Sonic Potions' TB-303 CPU replacement, for instance.
> 
> OTOH I started playing with modular synthesizers because I was spending 
> too much time staring at screens. So I can understand not wanting to 
> spend hours programming things.
> 
> John
> 
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 at 22:23, Gordonjcp <gordonjcp at gjcp.net 
> <mailto:gordonjcp at gjcp.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 12:19:29PM +0100, Gerry Murray wrote:
>      > One major advantage that David Dixon has in his designs is that
>     in 20 years
>      > time, someone plugs it in and it doesn't work, everything that
>     makes it do
>      > it's job is right there in plain sight and could be repaired.
>      > Take any uProcessor driven design. In 20 years, plug it in and if
>     it doesn't
>      > work., it's for the trash.
> 
>     I mean, I'm currently repairing 40-year-old microcontroller based
>     stuff that wasn't exactly spiffy new tech when I was in primary
>     school, but okay.
> 
>      > So David is making something that has far greater longevity than
>     , for
>      > example, my precious midi message handler embedded in a Microchip 18F
>      > microcontroller.
> 
>     Assuming you can get the chips, or anything remotely like them. 
>     Look at how many logic IC are simply no longer available with no
>     reasonable replacement, like 16-to-4 encoders.
> 
>     -- 
>     Gordonjcp
> 
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