@StarkRG That is a cool idea. I think Arduino & C++ is your best bet also, or possibly an ESP? I think there's some newish versions that are designed specifically to run on ulta-low power... but it's foggy. Either way, you're gonna get more for your electrons with C++ I think.
@jpaskaruk Yeah, it's an ESP-32, I'm just using the Arduino IDE and libraries. I was gonna go for the full espressif IDE (based on Eclipse), but the Arduino libraries have good documentation and it wouldn't take much to rewrite it without the Arduino hand-holding. Apparently the C3 version has the lowest power draw in sleep of all the hobbyist-oriented MCUs as well as the best compute-per-watt, but I don't have any of those so it'll be an S2 for now. Again, should be easy to adapt if I change it
@StarkRG I think, though, that Python probably has a much larger community of active users with a "deep" understanding of the language, owing to the fact that Python is just that much easier to learn, and therefore, will have that many more users.
"Deep" in quotes cause the whole point of Python is to not make you think too deeply at first, or ever, if you don't want to. C/C++ you need to do some understanding in order to make good use of em.
@jpaskaruk I've dipped my toe into python. I wrote a script to plot a bunch of data points (I ended up learning R to do all the heavy lifting and just used python to generate the visual). My experience was less than stellar. I know there's no accounting for taste and all, but it just really didn't feel all that friendly to me. I kept thinking that I should be learning something else instead. Like maybe Rust.
@StarkRG I used it on a job, had learned it via an online course for a lark, and then found myself running ragged chasing crashed blade servers, but aware that I had two Python APIs and a way to kick them via SSH, and after a bit of very basic scripting, suddenly I had hours and hours of free time, in which I built out some web UI tooling to allow others to manage those blades with ease.
For the right jobs, it's just extremely useful. I feel like I should mention Perl again here for some reason. 😜
@jpaskaruk Yeah, Perl sucks too. It's definitely an unfriendly language, but I think, based on my limited experience of both, I'd still choose Perl over Python. I probably remember more Python than I do Perl, but I don't remember getting quite as frustrated at it (which is different from the normal frustrations involved with coding, it's like when a game has a terrible interface and you feel like you're fighting the controls more than playing the game).
@StarkRG I have once or twice looked at Perl, but never actually used it lol
BUT, I grew up with an uncle who "did computers" and had a roomful of em in the 80s, gave me my first 1200 baud modem when that cost a fair amount still, I just noticed it on his shelf, unused, and he could clearly see that I was dazzled, and just sent me on home with it. And I remember him going off about Perl, while also openly admitting to using it. Hanging out with him I was around people from the local U, but I was far too ADHD'd and my family took too long to buy me a computer, to take advantage of that privilege, at the time.
So I have grown up with an impression of it as kinda like programmer's duct tape, cause everyone else talks about it like he does, like the ancient jackknife you prefer to use for making kindling, even though it's mostly dull af, because it was handed to you by a departed ancestor...
@jpaskaruk I learned it around the late 90s/early 2000s because it was "the thing" for doing server-side scripting. As it turned out, though, you could use literally any executable, not just scripts, as long as it could take HTTP POSTs as input and produce HTML (or, really, anything the browser can understand, like images) as output. Then PHP came around and was significantly easier to deal with. At least until that ballooned into an unmanageable mess.