Yes. Good old Arduino is what I used as I wanted a quick solution, is plenty fast enough and I could get a 16x2 LCD "shield" with buttons off ebay for crazy cheap which did for the front panel.
They've come a long way since the 8051s I started with. I've got an assortment of Arduino Nanos, PICs and TI uCs around for messing with.
I started a bit later on the good old PIC16F84. I have a similar assortment from ATtiny4 up to Altera cycloneIII FPGA (which admittedly I have never done anything useful with yet. The Actel FPGAs won on usability, that high speed data acquisition system is another half finished project....)
The NIOS is an interesting beasty; I quite like the ability to synthesise chunks of critical code as gates. A pity they never sorted out the ability to generate the CPU as a big-endian variant though.
Not tried the Actels.
The worst thing is I can't remember which Lilliputians were big-endian and who were little-endian.
Sorry, we may have gone a little off topic here....
I'm resurrecting this thread as I'm still mulling the idea over. Did you get to try one out Lauren and did you buy one?
I saw them being demo'd at the Spring Show but at the time I was fixated on plating machines, so didn't pay much attention. Wish I had now, as I've gone off the idea of a plating machine.
How successful are they with silver? I'm thinking mainly in terms of joining jump rings and adding findings where the piece has already been polished and engraved.
PS, please don't even mention making my own, as even the thought is ridiculous beyond words for someone who doesn't know her big from her little end and for whom a Lilliputian is a small character in a book!
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