2 years ago I wanted an easy way to listen to commodore 64 sid tunes on my computer without the need of powering on my c64 everytime but with the benefits of having real sid chips. After doing some research I concluded that the available uab hardware sid boards were either unavailable or outdated. This started my journey to create my own usb board, USBSID-Pico. Currently at version 1.3 of the pcb with an improved version and pro version in development.
The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator.
As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators
to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie.
Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe.
From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years
It's good to read that Clojure is getting more and more exposure. I write Clojure fpr my day job and wouldn't want to swap it for anything. The community is small but very helpfull and easy reachable. The learning curve is steap indeed, but very much worth it!
For me as the only developer at the company I work for it's either having to break creative (thinking) flow to switch to anything else that is expected or asked from me by my employer/colleagues, my own thought process wandering off due to unexpected hickups / issues I come across and have to fix first, or not remembering why or how I made something the way I did. On top of that it's also having to figure out my predecessors code descriptions.
This month I released USBSID-Pico v1.3 pcb via PCBWay and Retro8BitStore and yesterday firmware version v0.5.0-BETA.
The new pcb now supports mixed MOS6581 / MOS8580 chips (voltage) at the same time and new firmware brings a lot of tweaks and improvements making Commodore64 digitunes play better on Windows.
USBSID-Pico is a RPi Pico (RP2040/W RP2350/W) based board for interfacing one or two MOS SID chips and/or hardware SID emulators over (WEB)USB with your computer, phone, ASID supporting player or USB midi controller.
Clojure isn't dying, it's a niche language with a very much alive community. I admit that jobs are limited, but the ones that do exist are very interesting. My day job consists solely of programming in Clojure, so no, dead is not the correct word here.
Working on a v1 firmware for USBSID-Pico now that I have ordered the first v1 pcbs.
https://github.com/LouDnl/USBSID-Pico
USBSID-Pico is a RasberryPi Pico based board for interfacing one or two MOS SID chips and/or hardware SID emulators with a computer/phone over USB.
You obviously dont code in Clojure for a loving. Clojure's eco system and community is well maintained. Clojure comes in multiple flavors where Clojure and Clojurescript are 2 mainly used. Ofcourse there is also Babashka, Scittle etc., but all derive from clj or cljs.
As far as development tooling it all depends on the platform you code on and what ide suits your needs.
Emacs, Neovim, VScode, IntelliJ for example have different tooling.
Build systems differ and suits ones needs, for clj deps.edn is the current lost used followed by leiningen. For cljs there is shadowcljs and many more.
I agree that as new comer this can be quite overwhelming, but the community is great and always helpful.
I program for a living and have done so in multiple languages, Clojure is by far my most favorite.
The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator.
As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie. Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe.
From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years