Grok joins Claude, Copilot and Gemini in my hall of shame; pleased to hear my 1627 Plotter card was built successfully for another 1130

1627 CONTROLLER CARD SUBSTITUTE WAS ADOPTED AND IS IN USE

Friends at a museum in Europe have made use of the 1627 github project to build a substitute card and install it per the instructions. They have already restored a 1627 Plotter but did not have the controller card installed in their 1130 to make use of it. Today they first tested it out - it is working perfectly and soon they will try out a special feature I added above and beyond the IBM functionality. 

It emits a stream of movement messages on a serial link over USB - that will allow programs to draw plots virtually through the link rather than consume the very rare plotter paper stocks. Those virtual graphs can be displayed live on a monitor and/or printed on a color printer. 

PUT IN THE SAME EIGHT HOURS WITH GROK AS I GAVE THE OTHER AI SYSTEMS

I have a very simple objective in mind, a way to access the virtual disk cartridge files from the Virtual 2315 Cartridge Facility (V2315CF) from a PC without having to open the mini cartridge and transfer the microSD card into a card reader on the PC. It should be easy to have a microcontroller access the mini cartridge in much the same way that the V2315CF does, then present the fat32 file system from the card as a disk drive on the PC. 

The V2315CF makes use of a Raspberry Pi PICO to read and write on the microSD cards, accessing the files through a 2x4 socket that the mini cartridge plugs into. There are several successful projects that people have done with a PICO that accomplished exactly what I want - accessing a microSD card then projecting it to a PC as a disk drive. However, I have yet to get this to work even starting with each of the previously successful projects.

I attempted to lean on the various AI systems to work my way through the creation and testing of the project, but was not impressed at all with the quality of the advice. My impression was that these were good a doing extensive web searches and read through many accounts and documents, but lacked much understanding of the subject. As a result, the advice was often stale or wrong, leading in circles and taking pointless diversions. 

Grok was the last of the AI systems I attempted with this. If the question I asked was straightforward, one whose answer comes out of a manual or is simple syntax, the results were quite satisfactory. When things are going wrong but it is a misbehavior or misconfiguration rather than straightforward syntax, the results were poor. 

I gave Grok the chance to help me implement the example from the no-OS-FatFS-SD-SDIO-SPI-RPi-PICO library that is essentially exactly what I want to accomplish. There is only a very minor difference between what I want and the example - the microSD card socket was accessed by SDIO instead of SPI - thus it should have been a simple matter of building it and being done.

That is not how this went, however. Between configuration issues with Visual Studio Code, problems with the build process and other issues that arose, it did take about seven hours just to get the code to build but somehow it is not working on the PICO. 

I believe I would have made faster progress on all of these by doing my own google searches and read the documents and source code myself, so that I understood what is going on and can achieve some success.