Hi, creator here, yes I have a long history of advocating violence _in response to violence_.[1]
I'm also the founder of Guillotinery[2], a guillotine startup. I'm looking for some VCs that would like to get in on the ground floor of overthrowing capitalism.
Creator here. Yes, the original idea ended up being a ~$200 BOM or something like that. I dug in and decided to do _everything_ on a $2 microcontroller.
Unfortunately for me, that means spending a lot of time getting the code to work, and getting the code to work fast. And writing a TFT driver from a datasheet that is incomplete. That's why it's been taking so long. That, and quarantine miasma and depression or something like that.
Now the BOM is reasonable, and this is something I can sell for ~$100. With some careful component selection, the major items on the BOM will also be in production for the next decade, so there's time for me to amortize how much time I've spent on this.
Give it a few months. I'm hoping to get some prototype units in the hands of testers by April.
Creator here. It's a dumb terminal. Out of the box, it does nothing. It's a keyboard and a screen, and everything you type goes onto the screen and out the serial port.
However, there's an internal 2x20 header that just happens to have the same pin configuration as a popular single board computer. If you plug in that SBC, it becomes a full *nix system. And you'll be able to upgrade when a newer version of that SBC comes out.
Think of it as a VT-180, but instead of a custom Z80 board running CP/M, it uses a Linux board you probably already have sitting in a drawer somewhere.
You can do it for ~$30-40. There are two problems: The screen, and the microcontroller. For the screen, you can just use a regular TFT, and only display one color. This has the benefit of bringing down the size of the frame buffer down from 800x480x8 or 16 to 800x480x1. That's still a lot of RAM for a microcontroller, but you can get displays with onboard graphics RAM, and any small microcontroller can use the on-board GRAM as a framebuffer. Line scrolling is a bit of a trip (kind of like a bubble sort, but on lines of pixels), and blinking the cursor is _weird_, but yeah, it can be done on a $1 microcontroller and a $5 screen.
Blinking used to be accomplished by XORing the pixels with '1'. The nice thing is it doesn't use any memory to restore it since you just XOR a second time to get what you had back.
While plagiarism is unethical, nearly all means to combat it (detection software, esp. Turnitin) is also unethical; two wrongs don't make a right.
Under the ToS of all plagiarism detection software (at least that I've looked at), the student's work is added to the corpus against which all texts are tested against. This is what you would _obviously_ do if you were building a plagiarism detection app, however that means a student is forced to submit work to a private company, which will then profit off of their work.
You might say what the value of a gen ed term paper is to a student, and I'll agree it's not much. But that's not the point. The student is forced to provide that to a third party by the school, which will then profit from it. This isn't a Facebook-like situation where you can just not make a Facebook account. I would guess in many schools, refusing to submit to plagiarism detection software would be taken as evidence of plagiarism.
This is probably a few years out of date, and I see that Turnitin recently shut off their 'upload your own work so you can see if it's plagiarized' product, but for a student to have an active defense against plagiarism _costs money_. Yes, if a student wanted to make sure their paper wasn't accidentally plagiarized (this is common, because their algorithms are shit), that will cost a few dollars. This is unacceptable.
And for anyone who says, 'just transfer sections to a prof that doesn't use the software', there are contracts with entire departments and schools, which then force professors to use the software. Yeah, you could transfer _schools_, but the point stands.
Plagiarism detection software -- which purports to support the intellectual property of the author -- does just the opposite.
Also, I should mention that if someone wanted to cheat, they wouldn't plagiarize; they would simply get someone to write a paper for them. This service is far, far more common that you would believe.
> Also, I should mention that if someone wanted to cheat, they wouldn't plagiarize; they would simply get someone to write a paper for them. This service is far, far more common that you would believe.
When I was in school students did plagiarize a lot. It went out of style as software was introduced. I distinctly remember the panic'ed buzz as students discovered the teacher (or professor) was using detection software. The services you're talking about are common precisely because of plagiarism detection software.
I'm not disagreeing with your points about morality of it though, just the efficacy.
For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are especially broken in nearly all modern OSes.
I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.
Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.
If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and jazip.
With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.
I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.
I did get a USB floppy drive a few years ago... don't even know for sure if/where I have it as I never actually used it... got it just in case I needed to get some data off for friends/family, but that use case never presented itself... I'd moved off of all floppy media by 2001.
It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.
I'm also the founder of Guillotinery[2], a guillotine startup. I'm looking for some VCs that would like to get in on the ground floor of overthrowing capitalism.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800415 [2] http://guillotinery.com/