[sdiy] 4-bit encoder?

[David G Dixon]

Rainer said:

There's always one who likes to make it more interesting:

 
http://www.jogis-roehrenbude.de/Leserbriefe/Bruegmann-Digital-Roehren-Clock/
Digital-Roehrenuhr.htm

(The pictures speak for themselves.)

YES!  That's a true work of art, which is noteworthy and exciting.  If he'd
just made a digital watch from a microcontroller, he'd be doing the same
thing that any reasonably well-educated 9-year-old could do today.  So what?
He obviously didn't need the clock he made, because, honestly, could you
imagine anyone less concerned with the passing of time than that guy?

Also, Gerry Murray's argument that my design will still be serviceable 40
years hence, because it doesn't contain any "made for obsolescence" chips,
also won't wash.  This thing only has to work long enough for me to make one
of my characteristically bad YouTube videos about it, and then I may never
turn it on again.  I made a video about its predecessor a couple of weeks
ago -- a quantizer based on an analog folding flash ADC.  What I'm working
on now is a similar quantizer that generates major, minor, harmonic major,
harmonic minor, octatonic, and whole tone scales, in addition to the
chromatic scale -- it's all those scales that require all the logic -- the
only logic chips in the first quantizer are a couple of quad XOR gates for
converting Gray code from the analog ADC to Binary code for the R-2R ladder
DAC.

Finally, the discussion about all the various microcontrollers and how long
they have been in service just reminds me of why I probably won't ever learn
to program chips -- because it just seems like work.  I write computer
programs as part of my day-job (one of my academic specialties is the
mathematical modeling of hydrometallurgical processes), and I don't want to
make it a part of my hobby.

Incidentally, I don't seem to have received the messages from Gerry Murray
or John Slee, but only read them second-hand, so I'm assuming that they were
sent only to individuals rather than the mailing list.  So, this is a
reminder: please "Reply to All" when responding to the list.