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One of the step changes in electronic construction at our level over the last ten or fifteen years has been the availability of cheap high-quality printed circuit boards. What used to cost hundreds of dollars is now essentially an impulse buy, allowing the most intricate of devices to be easily worked with. Many of us have put away our etching baths for good, often with a sigh of relief.

We’re pleased that [Riyas] hasn’t though, because they’ve etched an STM32 dev board that if we didn’t know otherwise we’d swear had been produced professionally. It sports a 176-pin variant of an STM32F4 on a single-sided board, seemingly without the annoying extra copper or lack-of-copper that we remember from home etching. We applaud the etching skill that went into it, and we’ll ignore the one or two boards that didn’t go entirely to plan. A coat of green solder mask and some tinning, and it looks for all the world as though it might have emerged from a commercial plant. All the board files are available to download along with firmware samples should you wish to try making one yourself, though we won’t blame you for ordering it from a board house instead.

It’s always nice to see that single board computers are not the sole preserve of manufacturers. If the RC2014 Micro doesn’t isn’t quite your style, there’s always the Blueberry Pi which features a considerably higher penguin quotient.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The ESP32 was introduced a few years ago as an inexpensive way to outfit various microcontrollers with WiFi or Bluetooth. Since then it has been experimented with and developed on, thanks to its similarities to the ESP8266 and the ability to easily program it. Watching the development of this small chip has truly been fascinating as it continues to grow. Or, in this case, shrink.

The latest development in the ESP32 world comes from [femtoduino] who, as the name suggests, makes very small things. This one is a complete ESP32 which fits inside a USB-A connector. The brains of the projects is the ESP32-D2WD which is a dual core chip with 2 Mb of memory, making it more than capable. In fact, a big part of this project was [femtoduino]’s modifications to MicroPython in order to allow it to run on this chipset. For that alone, it’s cool.

This project is impressive for both reasons, both the size and the addition to the MicroPython libraries. If you need something really really tiny, for whatever reason, you might want to look into picking up one of these. Be careful though, and be sure to get the latest version of the SDK.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Croatian engineers [Slaven Damjanovic] and [Marko Čalić] have developed a wireless system for farmers to monitor plant conditions and weather along their agricultural fields. The system uses an RFM95W module for LoRa communication, and devices are designed to be plug-and-play, battery-powered, and have long-range communication (up to 10km from the gateway).

It uses an ATMega328 microprocessor, and includes sensors for measuring soil moisture (FC28 sensor), leaf moisture (FC37 sensor), pressure (BME280 sensor), and air temperature and humidity (DHT22 or SHT71 sensor). The data is sent to a multichannel The Things Network  gateway that forwards the information to an external database, which then displays the data through a series of graphs and tables.

The software for sending messages to the gateway is based on the LoRa MAC in C (LMIC) and LowPower libraries and was developed by [ph2lb].

The purpose for the plastic enclosure to not only aesthetic, but it also protects the temperature and humidity sensors from direct exposure to sunlight and rain, which could affect the readings and create water leakage into the device. The custom 3D-printed enclosure is water-proof and works as a solar radiation shield to protect eAgrar from direct and reflected solar radiation.

The goal of the project has been to help fight against climate change, which has had a negative effect on agricultural production due to weather shocks and a lack of predictability in information from fields. Farmers have had to rely on using pesticides and chemical agents to prevent the development of diseases, which in turn pollutes the environment. The team hopes that eAgrar will provide more information to predict the appearance of disease and help farmers reduce costs, reduce damages to their plants, increase their yields, and increase the quality of their crops over time, all while using chemical agents less frequently and in smaller quantities.

The device uses a real-time clock (RTC) as a wakeup alarm and is powered by a 3.7V Li-Ion battery with a life of one year, although there is also a 5V boost converter for powering up to four 5V sensors. Their custom PCBs from JLCPCB have rust-resistant pads and vias, and remain high quality even at high temperatures.

For the LoRa wireless sensor network, the system set up allows the devices to be controlled remotely even when they are not connect to the Internet. Settings such as sleep time and communication parameters can be modified without reprogramming the device.

Currently, the Dashboard remains in Croatian, but it offers a wealth of information such as last measurements, graphs of temperature and moisture measurements, a data table with all data from the start of the device life, and a calendar for the user to use for recording notes.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Do you own a LightBlue Bean or Bean+ from Punch Through? If you don’t have one now, you probably never will, as the company has recently announced they’re no longer selling or supporting the Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers. The company says that after selling more than 100,000 Bean devices, the challenge of keeping up with a constantly evolving software ecosystem became too difficult, and they are instead going to focus their efforts on advising other companies on how to best develop Bluetooth products.

Frankly, that sounds a bit like getting advice on how to build a fully armed and operational battle station from the Empire, but who are we to judge. While the Bean family of devices clearly wasn’t able to go the distance, Punch Through at least got them out the door and supported them for longer than many might have expected given the increased competition in the BLE market. It’s not hard to do the math: the LightBlue Bean retailed for around $35 USD, and today you can get a BLE-capable ESP32 for five bucks.

So what happens to all those Beans out in the wild? Normally, the parent company dropping support for a microcontroller wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but this time around we have the “Bean Loader” to contend with. This piece of software is used to push code to the device over Bluetooth, and it’s possible that the constant march of operating system upgrades (especially on mobile devices) will eventually break it. Long story short, there’s nothing to worry about in the short term. But down the road, these Beans might be baked.

Luckily, Punch Through did provide some pretty extensive documentation for the Beans. If there’s significant demand, we imagine the community will do their best to take over development of whatever ancillary software is required to keep the hardware usable for the foreseeable future. Speaking of which, the schematics and PCB layouts for both the Bean and Bean+ have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that somebody else might put them back into production.

[Thanks to Chris for the tip.]

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Writing image data to serially connected (SPI/I2C) displays from a microcontroller is easy enough these days, courtesy of standards defined by the MIPI Alliance, yet there are some gotchas in it which may catch someone using it unaware. [Larry Bank] wrote up a good summary of how one can get maximum performance out of such a display link.

At the core is the distinction between pixel data and command transmissions. The change from command to pixel data mode requires signaling, which takes precious clock cycles away from transferring pixel data between the MCU and display. The common MIPI DCS instruction set allows for a big reduction in needed data transfers by allowing parts of the display to be addressed instead of requiring a full refresh. Yet by not properly segmenting command and data transfers, one ends up unnecessarily slowing down the process.

The result is that one can run something like a Pac-Man emulator on an AVR MCU with a sluggish 320×480 SPI LCD at 60 FPS, as one can see in the video that is embedded after the break. Check the article for another demo video as well.

(Thanks to [nebk] for sending this in)

Tags:  microcontrollers  

With the winter months not far off, [Ben Brooks] was looking for a way to help circulate the heat from his wood-burning fireplace throughout his home. Rather than go with a commercial solution, he decided to come up with his own automated air circulation system powered by the mesh networking capabilities of one of his favorite pieces of tech, the Particle Photon.

Particle Xeon remote sensor

The idea here is pretty simple: use a remote temperature sensor to tell a fan located behind the fireplace when it’s time to kick on and start sharing some of that warmth with the rest of the house. But as usual, it ended up being a bit trickier than anticipated. For one, when [Ben] took a close look at the Vornado 660 fan he planned on using, he realized that its speed controller was “smart” enough that simply putting a relay on the AC line wouldn’t allow him to turn it on and off.

So he had to do some reverse engineering to figure out how the Sonix SN8P2501B microcontroller on the board was controlling the fan, and then wire the Photon directly to the pins on the chip that corresponded with the various physical controls. This allows the Photon to not only “push” the buttons to trigger the different speeds, but also read the controls to see if a human is trying to override the current setting.

For the remote side [Ben] is using a Particle Xenon, which is specifically designed for Internet of Things endpoints and sensor applications. Combined with a TMP36 temperature sensor and 3.7 V 500 mAh battery, this allowed him to easily put together a wireless remote thermometer that will publish the current temperature to the Photon’s mesh network at regular intervals.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Particle Photon used to augment an unassuming piece of hardware. We’ve previously seen one get grafted into a coffee maker, and if you can believe it, somebody even stuck one inside an umbrella to create a mobile weather station.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Wanting a simple tool to aid in the development of LoRa controlled robotic projects, [Jay Doscher] put together this very slick one-handed controller based on the 900 MHz Adafruit Feather M0. With a single trigger and a miniature analog joystick it’s a fairly simple input device, but should be just enough to test basic functionality of whatever moving gadget you might find yourself working on.

Wiring for this project is about as simple as you’d expect, with the trigger and joystick hanging off the Feather’s digital ports. The CircuitPython code is also very straightforward, though [Jay] says in the future he might expand on this a bit to support LoRaWAN. The controller was designed as a barebones diagnostic tool, but the hardware and software in its current form offers an excellent opportunity to layer additional functionality on a known good base.

Everything is held inside a very well designed 3D printed enclosure which [Jay] ran off on his ELEGOO Mars, one of the new breed of low-cost resin 3D printers. The machine might be pretty cheap, but the results speak for themselves. While resin printing certainly has its downsides, it’s hard not to be impressed by the finish quality of this enclosure.

While LoRa is generally used for transmitting small bits of information over long distances, such as from remote sensors, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it used for direct control of a moving object. If you’re not up to speed on LoRa, check out this excellent talk from [Reinier van der Lee] that goes over the basics of the technology and how he used it to build a community sensor network.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Python is a versatile, powerful language but sometimes it’s not the best choice, especially if you’re doing work in embedded systems with limited memory. Sometimes you can get away with MicroPython for these cases, but the best language is likely C or assembly. If you’re really stubborn, like [amirgon], and really want C and Python to play well together, you can make use of his new tool which can bring any C library to MicroPython.

As an example of how this tool is used, a “Pure MicroPython” display driver for ILI9341 on the ESP32, which means that everything was implemented in MicroPython. [amirgon] wanted to see how the Python driver would compare to one that’s already been written in C, and use it to showcase MicroPython binding. This tool also automatically converts structs, unions, enums and arrays to Python objects, and provides a means to work with pointers which is something that Python doesn’t handle in the same way that C requires.

[amirgon] hopes that this tool will encourage the adoption of Micropython by removing the obstacle of missing APIs and libraries in MicroPython. Since most libraries for systems like these are written in C, a way to implement them in Python is certainly powerful. We featured one use case for this a while back, but this is a much more generic fix for this coding obstacle.

Image via [Frank Stajano]

 

Tags:  microcontrollers  

There’s a spy movie – probably from the [James Bond] franchise – in which our hero is staying in a fancy hotel. It’s crawling with enemies, naturally, and eager to see if one has been snooping in his room while he’s out for martinis, he sticks a hair across the gap in the door. When he comes back and finds the hair missing, he knows the game is afoot.

This hotel safe intrusion detector is what [Q] might have thought up for such a job if he’d had access to PIC microcontrollers and SMD LEDs. [Andy]’s “LightSafer” is a silent alarm for hotel safes, drawers, closets, or even the refrigerator – anywhere where the transition from dark to light indicates an unwanted visit. It’s tiny – only 33 x 21 mm – and is powered by a CR2032 coin cell. A Broadcom APDS-9300 light sensor watches for openings while the PIC monitors a joystick control for the correct PIN entry. There’s no audible alarm; rather, an LED blinks to indicate an unauthorized intrusion and blinks once for every 15 minutes since the event.

LightSafer is simple but effective, with a clever UI that keeps the current draw low and the battery life long. [Andy] used a similar technique for this low-draw cat tracking collar that we featured a while back.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Making sure that an electric fence which is keeping one’s cattle and sheep from wandering off is still working properly seems like a fairly daunting task, especially when this fence is quite a distance from one’s home so checking up on it is time-consuming. After a friend of [kiu] got called a few times by the police because some of the sheep had pulled a prison break, the obvious technological solution was to IoT-enable the fence with LoFence.

This solution is nothing if not elegant in its simplicity. For phoning home with status data, the system uses the Microchip RN2483 IC, which handles pretty much all aspects of LoRaWAN, so that one merely has to send data to its serial interface to transmit. Because this system uses The Things Network (TTN) there are no service costs due to the low data rates. This was the easy part, aside from having to add a LoRaWAN gateway to boost the signal in the area with the electric fence.

With that side covered, the rest of the build features an AVR ATmega328p MCU, a resistor divider and op-amp (TLV9062) along with some passives. The resulting circuit measures voltage, essentially to detect whether the fence is still forming a full circuit. Hacking into the little box that energizes the fence might be a possible upgrade there, but at least it is a fairly uncomplicated way to measuring things. Electric fences do work best with a voltage on them, after all.

At the other end of the LoRaWAN network, the data is parsed and analyzed by a service so that it can be displayed on a Grafana dashboard, ensuring that a single glance suffices to see the current state of the fence and whether one has to dash out in the rain at 1 AM to fix it or not.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When a processor has a fault it can leave what looks to be precious little in the way of cause and effect. Debug-by-print-statement works surprisingly well in simple cases, but where in a desktop environment you would drop into a debugger to solve trickier problems this can be an onerous task on an embedded system. [Ross Schlaikjer]’s excellent blog post walks through setting up one of our favorite Open Hardware debug probes and shows us that with the right tooling in place, unexpected faults aren’t quite so impenetrable.

As it turns out, when a CPU faults it doesn’t blow away all its state. In fact, the fault handler is just another piece of code! It may not be safe to print, but through a debugger you can extract working registers to determine the cause of the fault and other state like what the last instruction was that the CPU was running before it happened! This can be done painstakingly with manual debug work, or you can following along with instructions like [Ross]’s and setup some clever code to extract the relevant values automatically. He provides an understandable explanation of what registers are interesting and how to put together structs to extract the values from them. Here at Hackaday we’re simple people, so besides the bitmask indicating fault type our favorite is the Link Register, which holds the address to return to (AKA the address which caused the fault!). There are a couple of other neat tricks like using the assembly instruction “BKPT #01” to force the debugger to breakpoint.

If this tickled your fancy and you want more conversation about embedded development, we spent some time discussing it and other topics on the Hackaday Podcast episode 31.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Let’s face it, synthesizers are awesome. But commercial synths are pretty expensive. Even the little toy ones like the KORG Volca and the MicroKORG will run you a few hundred bucks. For the most part, they’re worth the price because they’re packed with features. This is great for experienced synth wizards, but can be intimidating to those who just want to make some bleeps and bloops.

[Kenneth] caught the mini-synth bug, but can’t afford to catch ’em all. After a visit to the Moog factory, he was inspired to engineer his own box based on the Moog Sirin. The result is KELPIE, an extremely portable and capable synth with 12 voices, 16 knobs, and 4 LED buttons. KELPIE is plug and play—power and a MIDI device, like a keyboard, are the only requirements. It has both 1/8″ and 1/4″ jacks in addition to a standard MIDI DIN connection. [Kenneth] rolled his own board based on the Teensy 3.2 chip and the Teensy audio shield.

Part of the reason Kenneth built this synthesizer is to practice designing a product from the ground up. Throughout the process, he has tried to keep both the production line and the DIYer in mind: the prototype is a two-part resin print, but the design could also be injection molded.

We love that KELPIE takes its visual design cues from the translucent candy-colored Game Boys of the late 90s. (We had the purple one, but always lusted after the see-through kind.)  Can we talk about those knobs? Those are resin-printed, too. To color the indicators, [Kenneth] used the crayon technique, which amounts to dripping molten crayon into the groove and scraping it off once hardened. Don’t delay; glide past the break to watch a demo.

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Tags:  microcontrollers  

There was a time when writing embedded systems meant never having to deal with graphical user interfaces, and spending long hours trying to free up a dozen bytes of ROM to add a feature. Nowadays, an embedded system is likely to have a screen and what would have been a huge amount of memory even for a PC a scant decade ago. Qt has long been a popular choice for building software on desktop platforms, and — while not as popular — has even run on phones for a while. Now there’s Qt for MCUs which is clearly targeting the IoT market that everyone is trying to capture. You can see the glitzy video for the new product, below.

We generally like Qt, and the move recently has been towards an HTML-like markup language called QML instead of directly manipulating widgets. We guess that’s a good thing. However, Qt isn’t just for user interfaces. It provides a wide range of services in a straightforward way

The biggest draw though is that the system is portable. You mostly see Qt programs on Linux, but they work in a lot of other places including Windows and many cell phones. This will continue the drive to push Qt to as many places as possible. You can argue that Java does this, but a truly resource-friendly and hassle-free Java has been elusive. Even on big computers, the joke is often that Java is “write once, debug everywhere” — a play on the “write once, run everywhere” slogan.

We looked at QtCreator — a nice tool for working with Qt, back in 2016. You’ll see in that article, they offered an embedded Qt that was made to draw right to the framebuffer on a Linux platform. It will be interesting to see how the new product improves on that. Of course, the Raspberry Pi and its ilk can just run regular Qt, too. QtCreator can do more than Qt, with some help from some friends.

 

Tags:  microcontrollers  

In Alaska, the impact of climate change is easy to see. Already the melting permafrost is shifting foundations and rocking roads. Hotter summers are also turning food caches from refrigerators into ovens.

A permanent food cache. Via Wikipedia

[rabbitcreek]’s friend builds food caches with kids as part of a program to teach them traditional native activities. Food caches are usually inside buried boxes or small cabins raised on poles. Both are designed to keep hangry bears out. As you might expect, monitoring the temperature at these remote sites is crucial, so the food doesn’t spoil. His friend wanted a set-and-forget temperature monitoring system that could collect data for eight months over the winter.

The Alaska Datalogger carried a pretty serious list of requirements. It has to be waterproof, especially as ice and snow turn to water. Ideally, it should sip power and have a long battery life anyway. Most importantly, it has to be cheap and relatively easy for kids to build.

This awesome little data spaceship is designed around an O-ring used in domestic water purifiers. The greased up O-ring fits between two 3D printed enclosure halves that are shut tight with nylon bolts. Two waterproof temperature probes extend from the case—one inside the cache and the other outside in the elements. It’s built around an Adafruit Feather Adalogger and powered by an 18650 cell. The data is collected by visiting the site and pulling the SD card to extract the text file. There’s really no other way because the sites are far out of cell coverage. Or is there?

Though it probably wouldn’t survive the last frontier, this self-sufficient weather station is a simple solution for sunnier situations.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The Charliewatch by [Trammell Hudson] is one of those projects which is beautiful in both design and simplicity. After seeing [Travis Goodspeed]’s GoodWatch21 digital watch project based around a Texas Instruments MSP430-based SoC, [Trammell] decided that it’d be neat if it was more analog. This is accomplished using the CC430F5137IRGZR (a simpler member of the MSP430 family) and a whole bunch of 0603 SMD LEDs which are driven using Charlieplexing.

This time-honored method of using very few I/O pins to control many LEDs makes it possible to control 72 LEDs without dedicating 72 pins. The density makes animations look stunning and the digital nature melts away leaving a distinct analog charm.

A traditional sapphire crystal was sourced from a watchmaker for around 14€ as was the watch band itself. The rest is original work, with multiple iterations of the 3D printed case settling in on a perfect fit of the crystal, PCB, and CR2032 coin cell stackup. The watch band itself hold the components securely in the housing, and timekeeping is handled by a 32.768 kHz clock crystal and the microcontroller’s RTC peripheral.

The LEDs can be seen in both daylight and darkness. The nature of Charlieplexing means that only a few of the LEDs are ever illuminated at the same time, which does wonders for battery life. [Trammell] tells us that it can run for around six months before the coin cell needs replacing.

It’s completely open source, with project files available on the project’s Github page. We hope to see an army of these watches making appearances at all upcoming electronics-oriented events. Just make sure you lay off the caffeine as the process of hand-placing all those LEDs looks daunting.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Product recalls are one of those things that most people don’t pay attention to until things get really bad. If it’s serious enough for somebody to get hurt or even die, then the media will pick it up, but most of the time they simply pass by in silence. In fact, there’s a decent chance that you own a recalled product and don’t even know it. After all, it’s not like anyone is actually watching the latest product recalls in real-time.

Well actually, there might be one guy. [Andrew Kleindolph] has created a cute and cuddly gadget using CircuitPython on the Adafruit PyPortal to display the latest release from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC). In a wonderfully ironic touch, the child’s unicorn boot that the device lives in is itself a recalled product; apparently kids could pull off the “horn” and choke on it.

The PyPortal is basically built for this kind of thing, allowing you to easily whip up a display that will scrape data from whatever online source you’re willing to write the code for. All [Andrew] had to do was pair it with a battery so the boot could go mobile occasionally (we’re told they’re made for walkin’), and design some 3D printed accoutrements such as a screen bezel and charging port.

As these recalls (thankfully) don’t come out quite so fast that you need it to update more than once or twice a week, it seems like this could also be an excellent application for an Internet-connected e-ink display.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

[Fossa Systems], a non-profit youth association based out of Madrid, is developing an open-source satellite set to launch in October 2019. The FossaSat-1 is sized at 5x5x5 cm, weighs 250g, and will provide free IoT connectivity by communicating LoRa RTTY signals through low-power RF-based LoRa modules. The satellite is powered by 28% efficient gallium arsenide TrisolX triple junction solar cells.

The satellite’s development and launch cost under EUR 30000, which is pretty remarkable for a cubesat — or a picosatellite, as the project is being dubbed. It has been working in the UHF Amateur Satellite band (435-438 MHz) and recently received an IARU frequency spectrum allocation for LoRa of 125kHz.

The satellite’s specs are almost as remarkable as the acronyms used to describe them. The design includes an onboard computer (OBC) based on an ATmega328P-AU microcontroller, an SX1278 transceiver for telecommunications, and an electric power system (EPS) based on three SPV1040 MPPT chips and the TC1262 LDO. The satellite also uses a TMP100 temperature sensor, an INA226 current and voltage sensor, a MAX6369 watchdog for single-event upset (SEU) protection, a TPS2553 for single-event latch-up (SEL) protection and various MOSFETs for the deployment of solar panels and antennas.

Up until this point the group has been tracking adoption of LoRa through the use of weather balloons. The cubesat project plans to test the new LoRa spread spectrum modulation using less than $5 worth of receivers. Ultimately with the goal of democratizing telecommunications worldwide.

The satellite is being built in a cleanroom at Rey Juan Carlos University and has undergone thermovacuum and vibration testing at the facility. The group has since developed an educational satellite development kit, which offers three main 40×40 mm boards that allow the addition of modifications. As their mission states, the group is looking to develop an open source project, so the code for the satellite is freely available on their GitHub.

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Tags:  microcontrollers  

Here’s one that proves a hardware project can go beyond blinking LEDs and dumping massive chunks of data onto a serial console. Those practices are fine for some, but [dimtass] has found a more elegant hack for a more civilized age. His 3D Millennium Falcon model gets orientation data from his IMU as an an HID device.

The hardware involved is an MPU6050 6-axis sensor that is interfaced with a Teensy 3.2 board. [dimtass] documents his approach to calibrating the IMU going a bit further by using a Python script to generate offsets. We’ve advocated using Jupyter notebooks in the past and this is a good example of Jupyter plotting the data and visualizing the effect of the offsets in a second pass.

When in action, the Teensy reads IMU data and sends it over a USB RAW HID interface. For the uninitiated, HID transfers are more reliable than USB CDC transfers (virtual serial port) because they use smaller data chunks per event/transaction and usually don’t require special drivers.  On the computer side, [dimtass] has written a small application that gets the IMU values over the RAW HID and then provides it to the visualization application.

A 3D Millennium Falcon model is rendered in Unity, the popular open source game development engine. Even though Unity has an API, this particular approach is more OS specific using a shared-memory technique. The HID application writes to a file (/tmp/hid-shared-buffer) which is then read by Unity to make orientation changes to the rendered model.

[dimtass] provides lots of details on the tools used to bring his project to life and it can be a great starting point for more projects that need interfacing sensors with a visualization system. We have seen ways to turn a person’s head into a joystick and if you need a deeper dive into Unity, look no further.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

For a long time it seemed like e-ink displays were outside the reach of us lowly hackers, as beyond the handful of repurposed Kindles that graced these pages, we saw precious few projects utilizing this relatively exotic display. But that’s changed over the last couple of years, and we’re thrilled to start seeing hackers bend this incredible technology to their will.

A perfect example is PaperLedger, an entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize by [AIFanatic]. This wireless device is designed to display the current price of various cryptocurrencies on its 2.9-inch e-ink screen and provide audible price alerts with its built-in speaker. It even has a web portal where users can configure the hardware or view more in-depth price information.

The PaperLedger is based on the TTGO T5 V2.2 ESP32, but it looks like [AIFanatic] is in the process of spinning up a new board for the MIT licensed project to address some nagging issues for this particular application. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there are any pictures of the new board yet, but a description of the changes on the Hackaday.IO page shows that most of the work seems to be going into improving support for running on batteries.

Even if you’re not interested in cryptocurrency, the PaperLedger looks like a fantastic little e-ink monitor for pretty much anything else you’d like to keep a close eye on. The GPLv3 licensed firmware is available on the project’s GitHub page, so expanding or completely changing the device’s functionality shouldn’t be too tricky for anyone with a desire to do so and a working knowledge of C++.

We’ve seen several projects using the various TTGO boards that mate an ESP32 with a display at this point, and it looks like a great platform to check out if you want to push some data to a little WiFi screen with the minimum amount of hassle.

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Tags:  microcontrollers  

We spend a lot of time in our community discussing the many home computers from the 8-bit era, while almost completely ignoring their industrial equivalents. While today a designer of a machine is more likely than not to reach for a microcontroller, four decades ago they would have used a single-board computer which might have shared a lot of silicon with the one you used to play Pac Man.

[Epooch] recently came into possession of a CMS 9619A Advanced Single Board Microcomputer, a rather unique Programmable Logic Controller intended for industrial applications. It’s powered by a Motorola 6809 CPU and features the usual array of peripheral chips. To unlock its secrets he reached not for an array of tools from 2019 but for a venerable Apple ][e microcomputer.

In this type of 8-bit machine the various peripherals are enabled through address decoding logic that toggles their chip select line when a particular I/O address is called. Sometimes this task is performed by a set of 74 or similar logic chips, but in the case of the CMS 9619A it falls upon a Programmable Array Logic (PAL). These chips, which could be thought of as a simple precursor to today’s FPGAs, were ideal for creating custom decoding logic.

As you might expect though, a PAL is an opaque device, so to deduce the address map it was necessary to reverse engineer it using the Apple ][‘s printer card and a bit of BASIC code. It then remained to do some ROM disassembly work and wire up the serial ports, before some ROM patching with the Apple ][ as an EPROM programmer to finally access the machine’s debugger.

The 6809 is famous as the brains of Radio Shack’s CoCo and the Dragon computers, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it in an SBC.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The modern hacker wields a number of tools that operate on the principle of heating things up to extremely high temperatures, so a smoke alarm is really a must-have piece of equipment. But in an era where it seems everything is getting smarter, some might wonder if even our safety gear could benefit from joining the Internet of Things. Interested in taking a crack at improving the classic smoke alarm, [Vivek Gupta] grabbed a NodeMCU and started writing some code.

Now before you jump down to the comments and start smashing that keyboard, let’s make our position on this abundantly clear. Do not try to build your own smoke alarm. Seriously. It takes a special kind of fool to trust their home and potentially their life to a $5 development board and some Arduino source code they copied and pasted from the Internet. That said, as a purely academic exercise it’s certainly worth examining how modern Internet-enabled microcontrollers can be used to add useful features to even the most mundane of household devices.

In this case, [Vivek] is experimenting with the idea of a smoke alarm that can be silenced through your home automation system in the event of a false alarm. He’s using Google Assistant and IFTTT, but the code could be adapted to whatever method you’re using internally to get all your gadgets on the same virtual page. On the hardware side of things, the test system is simply a NodeMCU connected to a buzzer and a MQ2 gas sensor.

So how does it work? If the detector goes off while [Vivek] is cooking, he can tell Google Assistant that he’s cooking and it’s a false alarm. That silences the buzzer, but not before the system responds with a message questioning his skills in the kitchen. It’s a simple quality of life improvement and it’s certainly not hard to imagine how the idea could be expanded upon to notify you of a possible situation even when you’re out of the home.

We’ve seen how a series of small problems can cascade into a life-threatening situation. If you’re going to perform similar experiments, make sure you’ve got a “dumb” smoke alarm as a backup.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

If you read Hackaday, it is a good bit you’ve heard of MQTT — Message Queueing Telemetry Transport. If you’ve not used MQTT before, you should check out Ably’s [Kayla Matthews’] post entitled  MQTT: A Conceptual Deep Dive paper. She does mention their MQTT protocol connector at the end, and has a few notes about Ably’s products, but most of the post is a normal white paper and has a lot of good info.

MQTT’s claim to fame, of course, is that it is very tiny and is made to minimize power consumption compared to heavier-weight protocols. When you are trying to provide or consume data from a device that has to last a year on a coin cell, MQTT is your friend.

What we liked about the white paper is that it covered the kind of architectural decisions you have to make when designing a system. There’s a section titled “When might you use MQTT?” and another titled “When shouldn’t you use MQTT?” Towards the end, the post even covers using Mosquitto, MQTT.js, and MQTTnet.

[Elliot Williams] did our coverage of MQTT in his Minimal MQTT series. We’ve also seen a lot of tutorial projects like this doorbell.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Having a good LCR meter was something which [Adil] had wanted for his personal lab, so as any good university student (and former Hackaday contributor) does, he ended up building his own. Using a Nucleo-F446RE board for the MCU side and a custom PCB for the side that does the actual measuring, he created a meter that reportedly comes pretty close to commercial meters, and for the low price of £55.

Running through some of the theory behind the design as well some design choices, the resulting product is then presented. The choice to not using a standard current shunt, but instead a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) is explained as well. Unfortunately there are no schematics or source code, and the text is somewhat unclear on some points, failing to explain some acronyms that’d make it hard for someone who is not active in this field to understand the full design.

We hope that [Adil] can address those points and provide design files and source code, as it does look like a very interesting project!

Tags:  microcontrollers  

There are few moments in history that have ever been recorded in more detail or analyzed as thoroughly as the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Getting three men to our nearest celestial neighbor and back in one piece took a lot of careful planning, and recording every moment of their journey was critical to making sure things were going smoothly. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of man’s first steps off our world, these records give us a way to virtually tag along with Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.

As part of the 50th anniversary festivities at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, [Andrew] created a badge that would let him wear a little piece of Apollo 11. Using an ESP32 and an eInk screen, it replays the mission transcript between the crew and ground control in real-time. It’s a unique way to experience the mission made possible by that meticulous data collection that’s a hallmark of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

[Andrew] was inspired by the “Apollo 11 In Real Time” website, but rather than pulling the content from the Internet, he’s loaded the mission transcripts onto the ESP32’s SPIFFS filesystem as a CSV file. Not that the badge is completely offline, it does need to connect to the Internet (via a hotspot on his phone) so it can keep its internal clock synchronized with NTP. Keeping everything local does reduce power consumption compared to streaming it from the Internet, but he admits that otherwise he didn’t give much thought to energy efficiency and there’s definitely some room for improvement.

The LILYGO TTGO board he’s using combines the ESP32 with a 2.13 inch eInk display, in a formfactor not unlike the Badgy we’ve covered previously. He was able to find a STL for a 3D printed case on Thingiverse which he modified to fit a battery. Unfortunately the original model was released under a license that prevents him from distributing his modified version, but it doesn’t sound too difficult to replicate if you’re interested in building your own running ticker of humanity’s greatest adventure.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

In an ideal world, shop space, tools, and components would be free. But until we get to that Star Trek utopia, hackerspaces will have to rely on donations from the community to help stay afloat. While asking for money, at least you can have some fun with it if you design and build an Internet-connected donation box.

Or at least that’s how [Goran Mahovlic] handled it for the Radiona hackerspace in Zagreb, Croatia. Not content with just cutting a slit in the top of a shoe box, he came up with a physical donation system that’s not only more informative for those donating, but more organized for those collecting the funds.

The key is a arcade-style programmable coin acceptor from SparkFun. When connected to a microcontroller, this allows the box to keep a running tally on how much money has been inserted. With the use of a RFM96 LoRa module, it can even report on the current haul while remaining mobile; perfect for when the hackerspace has events outside of their home base.

But counting quarters is hardly a task befitting a powerful microcontroller like the ESP32. So [Goran] gave the chip something to do in its spare time by adding a couple of buttons and an LCD. This allows the user to scroll through a list of various projects that are looking for donations, and decide which one they want to financially support. When the donation box counts how much money has been inserted, it records which project its been earmarked for.

Of course, if you’d rather the free market do its thing, we’ve seen this same coin acceptor used to build a locker-sized vending machine. Or if you’re feeling crafty, you could always try your hand at building one with cardboard.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Since Sputnik launched in the 1950s, its been possible to look outside at night and spot artificial satellites orbiting with the naked eye. While Sputnik isn’t up there anymore, a larger, more modern satellite is readily located: the International Space Station. In fact, NASA has a program which will alert anyone who signs up when the ISS is about to fly overhead. A better alert, though, is this ISS notifier which is a dedicated piece of hardware that guarantees you won’t miss the next flyby.

This notifier is built around the Tokymaker, a platform aimed at making electronics projects almost painfully easy to learn. Connections to various modules can be made without soldering, and programming is done via a graphical interface reminiscent of Scratch. Using these tools, [jaime_lc98] designed a tool which flips up a tiny paper astronaut whenever the ISS is nearby. The software side takes advantage of IFTTT to easily and reliably control the servo on the Tokymaker.

The project pages goes into detail about how to set up IFTTT and also how to use the block-style language to program the Tokymaker. It’s pretty straightforward to get it up and running, relatively inexpensive, and looks like a great way to get the miniature hackers in your life excited about space. If they happen to learn a little something in the proces, well, we won’t tell them if you won’t. It might also be a good stepping stone on the way to other ISS-related hacks.

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Tags:  microcontrollers  

When [Andy Brown] recently tripped over ST’s new G0 series of MCUs, he figured after some research that the best way to learn everything there’s to know about the STM32G0xx by making his own development board based around the STM32G081. The result is a Nucleo-style board, breaking out all pins to convenient 2.54 mm headers, and with a number of niceties, such as an on-board coin cell and 32.768 kHz LSE oscillator for RTC use and three different power supplies (3.3 V, 2.5 V, and 1.8 V) for the MCU.

The board is programmed with an external ST-Link programmer that connects to the SWD interface on the MCU, with a 20-pin programming header provided. While by no means small or compact, it makes for very easy breadboarding and prototyping, with all 2.54 mm headers accessible from the bottom and top.

As for the STM32G0 series itself, the jury is still out on its performance compared to the F0. The former swaps the Cortex-M0 core for an M0+, with a reduced pipeline length (3 stages in the G0) but increased frequency (64 MHz versus 48 MHz). The G0 has a little bit more SRAM, but so far less Flash storage. According to ARM, this MCU range is designed to remove any need to still use an 8-bit MCU. Big claims, indeed.

The biggest issue which [Andy] had while developing this board was probably with the CH340 USB-UART chip. Ordering them from AliExpress as is common, the CH340G ICs he got just wouldn’t work on the first board revision, forcing him to switch to the CH340E and requiring a board respin. This version has an internal oscillator and as a bonus even came in the original tape packaging when it arrived, instead of in a plastic baggy like with the CH340G parts.

See a video of [Andy] going through the design after the break.

Now that the board is up and running, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of performance can be extracted from this new MCU range and whether it lives up to the hype. On [Andy]’s blog you can find the design files, gerbers and a complete BOM for the board, so that you can easily make your own.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Cruise around AliExpress for long enough and you’ll find some interesting new hardware. The latest is the TTGO T-Call, an ESP32 breakout board that also has a cellular modem. Yes, it’s only a 2G modem, but that still works in a lot of places, and the whole thing is $15.

On board the TTGO T-Cal is the ESP-WROVER-B, the same module you all know and love that features a dual-core ESP running at 240 MHz with 4 MB of Flash and 8 MB of SRAM. Add to this WiFi and Bluetooth, and you have a capable microcontroller platform. Of note is that this board includes a USB-C port, ostensibly wired so that it behaves like a normal USB micro port. That’s neat, 2019 is the year USB C connectors became cheaper than USB micro connectors.

In addition to the ESP32 module, there’s also cellular in the form of a SIM800 module. This module has been around for a while and used in many, many cellular-connected projects and products like the ZeroPhone. This module is only a 2G module, and that’ll be going away shortly (if not already) in built-up areas, but this can serve as a building block for modules that have more Gees than a 2G module. That said, if you’re looking for a WiFi and cellular bridge for fifteen bucks, you could do a lot worse for a lot more money.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

We featured [Fabrizio Di Vittorio]’s FabGL library for the ESP32 back in April of this year. This library allows VGA output using a simple resistor based DAC (3 resistors for 8 colors; 6 resistors for 64 colors), and includes functions for PS/2 mouse and keyboard input, a graphics library, and many of the miscellaneous functions you might need to develop games on the ESP32. Now, a GUI interface library has been added to ease application development.

The GUI, of course, runs on the VGA output. The library includes what you’d expect from a minimal windowing GUI, like keyboard and mouse support, windows with the usual minimize/maximize/close controls, and modal and message dialog boxes. For input controls, there are labels, text boxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, normal and editable combo boxes, and listboxes — you know, pretty much everything you need to develop a modern GUI application. All the code is open-source (GPL 3.0) and in the GitHub repo.

While the original FabGL had a game-development orientation, the addition of this new GUI functionality opens up a new range of applications. If you want to find out more about using the FabGL library, you can check out our previous coverage of the mostly game-oriented functions.

You can get a look at the new GUI functions in action in the video, after the break.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

As [Paul Bardini] explains on the Thingiverse page for his “Micro:Bit Hand Controller”, the Bluetooth radio baked into the BBC’s educational microcontroller makes it an ideal choice for remotely controlling things. You just need to give it a nice enclosure, a joystick, a couple of buttons, and away you go. You can even use the integrated accelerometer as another axis of control. This is starting to sound a bit familiar, especially to gamers.

While it might not come with the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality, the 3D printable enclosure [Paul] has come up with for the Micro:Bit certainly takes more than a little inspiration from the iconic Wii “Nunchuck” controller. He’s jostled around the positions of the joystick and momentary buttons a bit, but it still has that iconic one-handed ergonomic styling.

In a particularly nice touch, [Paul] has built his controller around a Micro:Bit breakout board from SparkFun that allows you to plug the microcontroller in via its edge connector. This means you can pull the board out and still use it in other projects. The only other connection to the controller leads to the battery, which uses a two pin JST-PH plug that can easily be removed.

Thanks to this breakout board, the internal wiring is exceptionally simple. The joystick (the type used in a PS2 controller) and the buttons are simply soldered directly to pins on the breakout board. No passives required, just a few short lengths of flexible wiring to snake through the printed enclosure.

The Thingiverse page only has the STLs for the two halves of the controller, and no source code for the Micro:Bit itself. But it shouldn’t be terribly hard to piece together the basic functionality with example code that’s floating around out there. Especially since you can run Python on them now. Of course, you could also add Bluetooth to the original Wii version if you’re not looking to reinvent the wheel nunchuck.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

We all know the usual jokes about the ‘S’ in ‘IoT’ standing for ‘Security’. It’s hardly a secret that security in embedded, networked devices (‘IoT devices’) is all too often a last-minute task that gets left to whichever intern was unfortunate enough to walk first into the office that day. Inspired by this situation, All About Circuits is publishing a series of articles on embedded security, with a strong focus on network security.

In addition to the primer article, so far they have covered the Diffie-Hellman exchange (using prime numbers, exponentiation and modular arithmetic) and the evolution of this exchange using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) which prevents anyone from brute-forcing the key. Barring any quantum computers, naturally. All three articles should be understandable by anyone, with a simple, step-by-step format.

The upcoming articles will cover implementing security on microcontrollers specifically.  For those who cannot wait to learn more, Wikipedia has a number of articles on the topic of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (comparing it to the more older and still very common RSA encryption) specifically, as well as the Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol as discussed in the All About Circuits article.

A detail of note here is that the hardest problem in secure communications isn’t to keep the communications going, but to securely exchange the keys in the first place. That’s why a much much computationally expensive key exchange scheme using an asymmetric (or public-key) cryptography scheme  is generally used to set up the second part of the communications, which would use a much faster symmetric-key cryptography scheme, where both parties have the means to decode and encode messages using the same private key.

All the math aside, one does have to wonder about how one might denote ‘secure’ IoT. Somehow ‘SIoT’ doesn’t feel very catchy.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

While he couldn’t quite come up with the cash to buy one in their hayday, [Bruno Antunes] has always been fascinated with the Amiga. When PCs got fast enough he used emulators like UAE to get a taste of the experience, but it was never quite the same thing. Not until he found the MiST anyway, which uses an FPGA to implement several retro computers such as the Apple II, Atari, and of course his beloved Amiga.

The only downside for [Bruno] was that the MiST has no network interfaces. To get onto the Internet, he had to install an ESP8266 inside the device and spend some quality time tweaking various software settings to get everything talking to each other. The end result is a BBS hosted on an Amiga 1200, that’s running on an FPGA, that’s connected to WiFi via an ESP8266. What a time to be alive.

Adding the ESP8266 to the MiST was actually quite straightforward, as there’s an unpopulated serial port header right on the board. Though [Bruno] cautions this header has been removed as of version 1.4 of the device, so if you’re in the market for an FPGA retro box and might want to get it online at some point, that may be a detail to keep in mind. The ESP is running a firmware which implements Serial Line IP (SLIP); which allows you to use TCP/IP over a serial port, albeit very slowly.

The hardware implant went well enough, but unfortunately [Bruno] found the ESP8266 was unable to communicate through the thick metal case of the MiST. He enlisted his girlfriend to make a new papercraft enclosure for the MiST that the ESP could talk though, and it even has the added benefit of glowing thanks to the internal LEDs. We probably would have just got one of the ESP modules that includes an external antenna, but to each their own.

With the hardware taken care of, the rest of the considerable write-up details how he got the Amiga operating system to talk to the Internet through the SLIP connection. He goes over everything from setting the system time with NTP to getting a Telnet daemon installed. As you might expect, this involves installing a number of additional software packages, but [Bruno] is kind enough to provide links for everything you’ll need.

We’ve seen the ESP8266 used to get other retro computers onto the modern Internet before, but it’s usually through the use of an external device. This internal modification is very clean, and seems like a no-brainer for anyone who owns a MiST and a soldering iron.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Parallel processing is an idea that will be familiar to most readers. Few of you will not be reading this on a device with only one processor core, and quite a few of you will have experimented with clusters of Raspberry Pi or similar SBCs. Instead of one processor doing tasks sequentially, the idea goes, take a bunch of processors and hand out the tasks to be done simultaneously.

It’s a fair bet though that few of you will have designed and constructed your own parallel processing architecture. [BB] sends us a link which though it’s an old one is interesting enough to bring you today: [Michael] created a massively parallel array of Parallax Propeller microcontrollers back in 2008, and he did so on a breadboard.

The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core RISC microcontroller from the company that had found success in the 1990s with the BASIC Stamp, the PIC-based board that was all the rage before Arduino came into the world. In the last decade it was seen as an extremely exciting prospect, but high price and arcane development tools compared to a new generation of low-cost and easy to code competitors meant that it never quite caught on and remains today something of an intriguing oddity. So today’s value in this project lies not in something that you should run out and do yourselves, but instead in what the work tells us about the nuts and bolts of parallel processing architecture. It involves more than simply hooking up a load of chips and hoping for the best, and we gain some insight into the different strategies involved.

The Propeller certainly wasn’t the first attempt at a massively parallel microcontroller, and we doubt it will be the last. We’re certainly seeing microcontrollers with more than one core becoming more mainstream even in our community, but even with those how many of you have made use of the second core in your dual-core ESP32? Is a multicore microcontroller a solution searching for a problem, or will somebody one day crack it and the world will never be the same again? As always, the comments are below.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

If you’re looking to add some realism to your flight setup without converting the guest bedroom into a full-scale cockpit simulator, you might be interested in the compromise [MelkorsGreatestHits] came up with. He bolted a genuine military keypad to his PC joystick and instantly added 100% more Top Gun to his desktop.

The Rockwell Collins manufactured keypad came from eBay, and appears to have been used in aircraft such as the EA-6B Prowler and Lockheed C-130 Hercules for data input. Each key on the pad is wired to the 37 pin connector on the rear, which [MelkorsGreatestHits] eventually mapped out after some painstaking work with a breakout board.

Once the matrix was figured out, he made up a cable that would go from the connector to a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller. The Teensy reads the keypad status and converts button presses over to standard USB HID that can be picked up in any game.

The joystick side of the build is a VKB Gunfighter, which is already a pretty nice piece of kit on its own. No modifications were necessary to the joystick itself, other than the fact that it’s now mounted to the top of a black project enclosure. It still connects directly to the computer via its original USB cable, as the keypad has its own separate connection. As luck would have it, the joystick is almost a perfect fit in the opening on the keypad, which presumably would have been for a small screen when installed in the aircraft.

Finding cockpit components from military aircraft on eBay is not as hard as you may think; something to keep in mind if you ever decide to tackle that custom flight simulator build.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Some of us here at Hackaday are suckers for a bit of chiptune music as the backdrop for many excellent times. The authentic way to create chiptunes is of course the original hardware, but in 2019 it’s far more common to do so with an emulator on a modern computer. That computer doesn’t have to sport a high-end processor and desktop operating system though, as [Deater] shows us with his ZX spectrum chiptune player on an STM32L46G Discovery board.

The impetus for the project came he tells us while teaching students to code simple sine wave music players, having code already in the bag for emulating the classic AY-3-8910 sound chip on the Raspberry Pi and the Apple II he decided to port that to the STM32L476 dev board. An earlier version used the internal DAC, but this was refined to send I2S data to an external DAC. The code can be had from GitHub (confusingly buried among code for an LED driver), and we’ve attached a video below of it playing some chiptune goodness.

Of course, Sinclair chiptunes don’t grab all the limelight. There have been plenty of Nintendo and Sega players too. You might also recognize [Deater] from his non-chiptune work, porting Portal to the Apple ][.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The infrared remote control might not hold the seat of honor in the average home theater setup that it once enjoyed, but it’s not quite out to pasture yet. After all, what are you going to use to stop Netflix once the Chromecast invariably disconnects from your phone? As long as there are devices out there that will respond to commands blasted their way via an IR LED, hackers will be looking to get in on the action.

In an effort to make IR remote hacking just a bit easier, [sjm4306] has submitted his Remoteduino for the 2019 Hackaday Prize. With this handy tool in your arsenal, you can focus on developing the software side of your next IR remote project without worry about the hardware. Just upload your code, and get clicking.

As you might imagine, the design is rather simple. On the front edge of the PCB you’ve got the prerequisite IR LED, and a healthy supply of tactile buttons that your code can use as input. The remote features a fairly standard layout on the top half, complete with silkscreened labels for the common functions, but below that [sjm4306] has packed in six general purpose buttons that can be used for whatever you like.

The Remoteduino is powered by an ATmega328P, and the whole thing runs on a CR2032 cell mounted on the backside. [sjm4306] mentions in his write-up on Hackaday.io that battery life was always a consideration during development of the Remoteduino, so he’s made a few energy-saving considerations. Using the internal 8 MHz oscillator instead of an external crystal shaved a bit off the top, and the aggressive sleep routines got him the rest of the way. In testing, he estimates the battery should last a few years even with daily use.

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Tags:  microcontrollers  

The keyboard is a superior means of input, but to date no one has really figured out how to make a keyboard for small, handheld electronics. You could use tact switches, but that’s annoying, or you could use a touch screen. The best option we’ve seen is actually a Blackberry keyboard, and [arturo182] has the best example yet. It’s a small handheld device with a screen, keyboard, and WiFi that’s ready to do anything imaginable. Think of it as an Open Source Fauxberry. In any case, we want it.

This project is actually a breakout board of sorts for the Adafruit Feather system, and therefore has support for WiFi, cellular, or pretty much any other networking of connectivity. To this blank canvas, [arturo] added an accelerator/magnetometer sensor, a single Neopixel, and of course the beautiful Blackberry keyboard. This keyboard is attached to an ATSAMD20G, a microcontroller with a whole bunch of I/O that translates key presses into I2C for the Feather.

Aside from that, there’s also a gigantic screen to display just about anything you would want in a portable computing device. There’s still a bit more work to do on this project, most notable figuring out where the battery goes, but [arturo] is developing everything in a livestream, someting we love to see as it really puts a focus on how much effort goes into making custom hardware.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The idea behind a dummy security camera is that people who are up to no good might think twice about doing anything to your property when they think they’re being recorded. Obviously a real security camera would be even better, but sometimes that’s just not economically or logistically possible. Admittedly they’re not always very convincing, but for a few bucks, hopefully it’s enough to make the bad guys think twice.

But what if that “fake” camera could do a little more than just look pretty up on the wall? [Chris Chimienti] thought he could improve the idea by adding some electronics that would notify him if motion was detected. As an added bonus, any would-be criminals who might be emboldened by the realization the camera itself is fake might find themselves in for a rude surprise when the notifications start firing off.

In the video after the break, [Chris] really takes his time walking the viewer through the disassembly of the dummy camera. As it turns out, these things look like they’d make excellent project enclosures; they come apart easily, have nothing but empty space inside, and even have an integrated battery compartment. That alone could be a useful tip to file away for the future.

He then goes on to explain how he added some smarts to this dummy camera. Up where the original “lens” was, he installed a PIR sensor, some white LEDs, a light sensor, and the original blinking red LED. All of this was mounted to a very slick 3D printed plate which integrates into the camera’s body perfectly. The new hardware is connected up to a similarly well mounted Wemos D1 Mini inside the camera. The rest of the video goes through every aspect of the software setup, which is sure to be of interest to anyone who’s ever thought of rolling their own IoT device.

This type of PIR sensor is hacker favorite, and we’ve seen a number of projects using them for all sorts of creative purposes. We’ve even seen them paired with the ESP8266 before for Internet-connected motion sensing, albeit without the tidy security camera enclosure.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Making a programming jig becomes exponentially more difficult after two pins and who would even consider building one if they were not setting up more than twenty boards? If it were easy for novices to construct jigs, we might all have a quiver of them on the shelf next to our microprocessors. Honestly, a tackle box full of homemade programming fixtures sounds pretty chic. The next advantage to ditching the demo boards is that bare processors take up less room and don’t draw power for unnecessary components like unused voltage regulators and LEDs. [Albert David] improves the return-on-time-investment factor by showing us how to repurpose a WeMos board to program a bare ESP8266 module.

[Albert]’s concept can apply to many other surface-mount chips and modules. The first step is to buy a demo board which hosts a programmable part and remove that part. Since you’ve exposed some solder pads in the process, put pogo pins in their place. Pogo pins are small spring-loaded probes that can be surface mounted or through-hole. We’ve used them for programming gorgeous badges and places where the ESP8266 has already been installed. When you are ready to install your software, clamp your Franken-porcupine to the controller and upload like normal. Rinse, wash, repeat. We even get a view of the clamp [Albert] uses.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

For anyone who’s seen a 1970’s era microcomputer like the Altair 8800 doing its thing, you’ll know the centerpiece of these behemoths is the array of LEDs and toggle switches used as input and output. Sure, computers today are exponentially more capable, but there’s something undeniably satisfying about developing software with pen, paper, and the patience to key it all in.

If you’d like to get a taste of old school visceral programming, but aren’t quite ready to invest in a 40 year old computer, then [GClown25] might have the answer for you. He’s developed a pocket sized “computer” he’s calling the BIT4 that can be programmed with just three tactile switches. In reality it’s an ATMega4809 running C code, but it does give you an idea of how the machines of yesteryear were programmed.

In the video after the break, [GClown25] demonstrates the BIT4 by entering in a simple binary counter program. With a hand-written copy of the program to use as a reference, he steps through the memory addresses and enters in the command and then the value he wishes to operate on. After a few seconds of frantic button pushing, he puts the BIT4 into run mode and you can see the output on the array of LEDs along the top edge of the PCB.

All of the hardware and software is open source for anyone who’s interested in building their own copy, or perhaps just wants to take a peak at how [GClown25] re-imagined the classic microcomputer experience with modern technology. Conceptually, this project reminds us of the Digirule2, but we’ve got to admit the fact this version isn’t a foot long is pretty compelling.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The world is full of single board computers that want a slice of the Raspberry Pi action. Most of them are terrible. But fools and their money, yadda yadda, and there’s a new sucker born every minute. The latest contender to the Raspberry Pi is the Atomic Pi. It’s an x86-based single board computer that costs $35, shipped to your door. Is it worth it? Is it even in the same market as a Raspberry Pi? Or is it just a small budget computer without a box? I have no idea.

With that said, the Atomic Pi comes with an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 with Intel HD Graphics (Cherry Trail). There is 2 GB of DDR3L-16000, 16 GB of eMMC, and an SD slot for storage. Connectivity is a full HDMI port (primary audio out), USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, a Mediatec RT5572 used for WiFi, a Qualcomm CSR8510 for Bluetooth 4.0, a “Legitimate licensed BIOS”, and a real-time clock. Overall, you’re looking at a top-of-the-line tablet computer from four years ago. One that would run Windows.

To use all the features of the Atomic Pi, you will need to buy a $15 breakout board to supply power to the board, and use a large industrial power supply, the kind you would normally find bolted to a RepRap or a homemade CNC machine. You will need to supply both 5 V and 12 V to the board if you would like to use the Class D audio amplifier, but if you only want to use audio over HDMI, supplying only 5 V will do. If you want to boot this board, it looks like you’ll need to bring a USB/TTL cable to make everything work. This may be a tough sell to a crowd with zero experience booting a bare Linux system. That said, it runs Nintendo 64 emulators well, which is the only reason people buy Raspberry Pis anyway.

Is the Atomic Pi the single board computer you need? I don’t know. But we’ve got an Atomic Pi on order, and we’re ready to go with a full review when it show up.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

[Robson] had been using the same multimeter since he was 15. It wasn’t a typical multimeter, either. He had programmed it to also play the Google Chrome jumping dinosaur game, and also used it as a badge at various conferences. But with all that abuse, the ribbon cable broke and he set about on other projects. Like this transistor tester that was just asking to have Tetris programmed onto its tiny screen.

The transistor tester is a GM328A made for various transistor testing applications, but is also an LCR meter. [Robson]’s old meter didn’t even test for capacitance but he was able to get many years of use out of that one, so this device should serve him even better. Once it was delivered he set about adding more features, namely Tetris. It’s based on an ATmega chip, which quite easy to work with (it’s the same chip as you’ll find in the Arduino Uno but [Robson’s] gone the Makefile route instead of spinning up that IDE). Not only did he add more features, but he also found a mistake in the frequency counter circuitry that he fixed on his own through the course of the project.

If you’ve always thought that the lack of games on your multimeter was a total deal breaker, this project is worth a read. Even if you just have a random device lying around that happens to be based on an ATmega chip of some sort, this is a good primer of getting that device to do other things as well. This situation is a fairly common one to be in, too.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Our single board microcontroller platforms have become smaller over the years, from the relatively large classic Arduino and Beagleboard form factors of a decade ago to the postage stamp sized Feather and ESP boards of today. But just how small can they go? With current components, [Femtoduino] think they’ve cracked it, delivering an ESP32-based board with WiFi and Bluetooth, and an LDO regulator for 5 V operation in a circular footprint that’s only 9 mm in diameter.

There are some compromises from such a paucity of real-estate, of which perhaps the most obvious is a lack of space to make I/O lines available. It has SPI, a UART, and a couple of I/O lines, and aside from an onboard RGB LED that’s it. But SPI is versatile well beyond its number of lines, and even with so little there is much that can be done. Another potential compromise comes from the antenna, a Molex surface-mount component, which is an inevitable consequence of a 9 mm circular board.

There has to come a point at which a microcontroller platform becomes so small as to be unusable, but it’s clear that there is a little further for this envelope to be pushed. We’d love to see what other designers do in response to this board.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

If you’re building a cubesat, great, just grab a microcontroller off the shelf, you probably don’t need to worry about radiation hardening. If you’re building an experiment for the ISS, just use any old microcontroller. Deep space? That’s a little harder, and you might need to look into radiation tolerant and radiation hardened microcontrollers. Microchip has just announced the release of two micros that meet this spec, in both radiation-tolerant and radiation-hardened varieties.

The new devices are the SAMV71Q21RT (radiation-tolerant) and the SAMRH71 (rad-hard), both ARM Cortex-M7 chips running at around 300 MHz with enough RAM to do pretty much anything you would want to do with a microcontroller. Peripherals include CAN-FD and Ethernet-AVB, analog front-end controllers, and the usual support for I2C, SPI, and other standards. This chip does it in space, and comes in a ceramic quad flat package with gold lead frames. These are beautiful devices.

Microchip has an incredible number of space-rated, rad-hard hardware; this is mostly due to their acquisition of Atmel a few years ago, and yes, it absolutely is possible to build a rad-hard Arduino Mega using the chip, space rated.

Of course, there are very, very, very few people who would actually ever need a rad-hard microcontroller; I would honestly expect this to be relevant to only one or two people reading this, and they too probably got the press release. If you’ve ever wanted to build something that goes to space, and you’d like to over-engineer everything about it, you now have the option for an ARM Cortex-M7.

Tags:  microcontrollers  

There’s perhaps no sound more recognizable than the frantic clicking of a Geiger counter. Not because this is some post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is personally acquainted with the operation of said devices, but because it’s such a common effect used in many movies, TV shows, and video games. If …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When designing a mains power supply for a small load DC circuit, there are plenty of considerations. Small size, efficiency, and cost of materials all spring to mind. Potential lethality seems like it would be a bad thing to design in, but that didn’t stop [Great Scott!] from exploring capacitive …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Historically, microcontrollers’ limited computing power and storage space meant software had to be written in low-level languages out of necessity. In recent years small affordable chips grew powerful enough that they could theoretically run higher level languages, sparking numerous efforts to turn that theory into reality. MicroPython delivered on this …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

RISC architecture might change the world, but it runs an NES emulator right now. That’s thanks to MaixPy, the new MicroPython for the K210, the recently released RISC-V microcontroller that’s making waves in the community. [Robot Zero One] has the tutorial and [Other Dave] of EEVBlog has a video of …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

A ruler seems like a pretty simple device; just a nice straight piece of material with some marks on it. There are some improvements out there to the basic design, like making it out of something flexible or printing a few useful crib notes and formulas on it so you …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

We can’t think of where you’d buy a new, cheap, MIDI keytar that’s just a keyboard and a handle with some pitch and mod wheels or ribbon controllers. This is a format that died in the 90s or thereabouts. Yes, the Rock Band controller exists, but my point stands. In …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Microcontrollers are wonderfully useful things, but programming them can be a little daunting if you’re used to the simplicity of compiling for regular PCs. Over time though, this has become easier. Communities have strayed away from assembly code and created higher-level languages such as Micropython, to allow these devices to …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

A metal detector used to be an entirely analogue instrument, an oscillator whose frequency changed with the inductance of its sense coil when a piece of metal approached. [Łukasz Podkalicki] shows us a more sophisticated machine, but with judicious use of an ATtiny 13 it is not a complex one. …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Just for the challenge, just for fun, just for bragging rights, and just to do a little showing off – all perfectly valid reasons to take on a project. It seems like one or more of those are behind this tiny ESP32 board that’s barely larger than the coin cell …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

At this point it’s something of a given that a member of the ESP8266 family is likely your best bet if you want to cobble together a small Internet-connected gadget. Costing as little as $3 USD, this well documented all-in-one solution really can’t be beat. But of course, the hardware …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

There are rumors of a cheap chip that does USB natively, has an Open Source toolchain, and costs a quarter. These aren’t rumors: you can buy the CH552 microcontroller right now. Surprisingly, there aren’t many people picking up this cheap chip for their next project. If there’s no original projects using this chip, no one is going to use this chip. Catch 22, and all that.

Like a generous god, [Aaron Christophel] has got your back with a working example of programming this cheap chip, and doing something useful with it. It blinks LEDs, it writes to an I2C display, …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Small microcontrollers can pack quite a punch. With the right code optimizations and proper use of the available limited memory, even small microcontrollers can do things they were never intended to. Even within the realm of intended use, however, there are still lots of impressive uses for these tiny cheap processors like [Lukasz]’s audio amplifier which uses one of the smallest ATtiny packages around in the video embedded below.

Since the ATtiny is small, the amplifier is only capable of 8-bit resolution but thanks to internal clock settings and the fast PWM mode he can get a sampling rate of …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When it comes to robots, it seems the trend is to make them as complicated as possible – look at anything from Boston Dynamics if you’ve any doubt of that. But there’s plenty to be said for simple robots too, such as this adorable ESP32-driven live-streaming bot.

Now it’s true that [Max.K]’s creation is more remote controlled car than robot, and comparing it to one of the nightmare-fuelling creations of Boston Dynamics is perhaps unfair. But [Max.K]’s new project is itself a simplification and reimagining of his earlier, larger “ZeroBot“. As the name implies, ZeroBot was controlled by a Raspberry …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Arduinos are a handy tool to have around. They’re versatile, cheap, easy to program, and have a ton of software libraries to build on. They’ve only been around for about a decade and a half though, so if you were living in 1989 and wanted to program a microcontroller you’d probably be stuck with an 8-bit microprocessor with no built-in peripherals to help, reading from a physical book about registers and timing, and probably trying to get a broken ribbon cable to behave so it would actually power up. If you want a less frustrating alternate history to live in, …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

In a world where standards come and go with alarming speed, there’s something comforting about VGA. It’s the least common denominator of video standards, and seeing that chunky DB15 connector on the back of a computer means that no matter what, you’ll be able to get something from it, if you can just find a VGA cable in your junk bin.

But that’s the PC world; what about microcontrollers? Can you coax VGA video from them? Yes, you can, with an ESP32, a handful of resistors, and a little bit of clever programming. At least that’s what [bitluni] has managed …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

After a hard day of soldering and posting memes online, sometimes you just want to yell at the blinking hockey puck in the corner and have it pour you out a perfectly measured shot of your favorite libation. It might not be the multi-purpose robot servant we were all hoping to have by the 21st century, but [Jake Lee] figures it’s about as close as we’re likely to get for under fifty bucks or so (Jake’s security certificate seems to have expired a few days ago so your browser may warn you, here’s an archived version).

From the hardware to …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

RISC architecture is gonna change everything, and I still can’t tell if we like that movie ironically or not. Nevertheless, RISC-V chips are coming onto the market, chipmakers seem really interested in not paying licensing fees, and new hard drives are shipping with RISC-V cores. The latest development in Open instruction sets chips comes from OpenISA. They’ve developed the VEGAboard, a dev board with two RISC-V chips and Arduino-style pin headers.

The VEGAboard comes loaded with an NXP chip which combines an ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M4. So far, so good, but there are already dozens of boards that combine two …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

As we’ve said many times in the past, the wide availability of low-cost modular components has really lowered the barrier to entry for many complex projects which previously would have been nigh-on impossible for the hobbyist to tackle. The field of robotics has especially exploded over the last few years, as now even $100 can put together a robust robotics experimentation platform which a decade ago might have been the subject of a DARPA grant.

But what if you want to go even lower? What’s the cheapest and easiest way to put together something like a telepresence robot? That’s exactly …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the value of putting tiny WIFi-enabled microcontrollers on a module that costs a dollar or two. Those smart light bulbs in your house probably have an ESP8266 in them, and you can build a WiFi-enabled anything with one of these chips for next to no money. Now there’s a new module that takes the design philosophy of, ‘a reasonably powerful microcontroller, on a module, that does WiFi’ to its logical conclusion. It’s the W600 module from Seeed Studios. It’s got an ARM Cortex-M3, it’s FCC and CE certified, it’s got WiFi, and it’s …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Here at Hackaday, we love knobs and buttons. So what could be better than one button? How about 16! No deep philosophy about the true nature of Making here; [infovore], [tehn], and [shellfritsch] put together a very slick, very adaptable bank of 16 analog faders for controlling music synthesis. If you don’t recognize those names it might help to mention that [tehn] is one of the folks behind monome, a company built on their iconic grid controller. Monome now produces a variety of lovingly crafted music creation tools.

Over the years we’ve written about some of the many clones and …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

TI certainly have certainly seen off rivals such as HP or Casio to capture the lion’s share of the calculator market. The TI-84 is a real staple, and with as many units as there are out there, hacking them is a given. However, selecting an operating system for the machine can be a hassle. TI-OS is proprietary and doesn’t really want to let you do everything you’d like to. There are alternatives, but many of them won’t let you easily use your calculator to be — well — a calculator.

[Siraben] has zkeme80 which is essentially ANS Forth (mostly) with …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Small microcontrollers and tiny systems-on-chips are getting more and more popular these days as the price comes down and the ease of programming goes up. A Raspberry Pi is relatively inexpensive and can do pretty much everything you need, but not every chip out there can do something most of us take for granted like output video. For a lot of platforms, it’s next to impossible to do while saving any processor or memory for other tasks besides the video output itself.

[Dave] aka [Mubes] has been working on the Blue Pill platform which is a STM32F103C8 board. While they …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Watchdog timers are an often overlooked feature of microcontrollers. They function as failsafes to reset the device in case of a software failure. If your code somehow ends up in an infinite loop, the watchdog will trigger. This is a necessity for safety critical devices. If the firmware in a pacemaker or a aircraft’s avionics system gets stuck, it isn’t going to end well.

In this oldie-but-goodie, [Jack Ganssle] provides us with a great write up on watchdog timers. This tells the story of a failed Clementine spacecraft mission that could have been saved by a watchdog, and elaborates on …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

[foamyguy] loves Python and messing around with electronics. Boards such as Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express make it easy for him to take both anywhere. He recently found himself wanting to program Circuit Python boards in the field, but doesn’t always have a laptop on him. So he created an Android app to make on-the-go programming fast and easy.

Using CircuitPython Editor and one or two USB cables, you can program Circuit Python boards with most Android device, including Tinkerboards. It features serial communication, a basic code editor, and a REPL sandbox for code-based castle building. [foamyguy]’s most recent addition to …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Sometimes the best hacks come from the most basic of questions. In this case, [CNLohr] was wondering what would happen if he started to reduce the clock speed of the ESP8266’s Baseband PLL (BBPLL) while still trying to communicate with it. You know, as one does. The results ended up being fairly surprising, and while it’s not immediately clear if there’s a practical application for this particular trick, it’s certainly worth some additional research.

The idea here is that the BBPLL is the reference clock for the entire system, including all of the peripherals. So underclocking it doesn’t just slow …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

We live in the future. You can ask your personal assistant to turn on the lights, plan your commute, or set your thermostat. If they ever give Alexa sudo, she might be able to make a sandwich. However, you almost always see these devices sending data to some remote server in the sky to do the analysis and processing. There are some advantages to that, but it isn’t great for privacy as several recent news stories have pointed out. It also doesn’t work well when the network or those remote servers crash — another recent news story. But what’s the …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

How many mundane devices upgrade to IoT because they let you monitor a single data point or a variable? That little nudge over the communication precipice allows you to charge 500% more. Now, if you are as handy as a Hackaday reader, you can throw a lazy afternoon at the problem and get the same effect from a “dumb” appliance. If IoT is as simple as getting a notification when your laundry is dry, or your water is boiling, all you really need is a WiFi device and a push notification, right? Does it need to be more complicated than …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The harp is an ancient instrument, but in its current form, it seems so unwieldy that it’s a wonder that anyone ever learns to play it. It’s one thing to tote a rented trumpet or clarinet home from school to practice, but a concert harp is a real pain to transport safely. The image below is unrelated to the laser harp project, but proves that portable harping is begging for some good hacks.

Enter this laser harp, another semester project from [Bruce Land]’s microcontroller course at Cornell. By replacing strings with lasers aimed at phototransistors, [Glenna] and [Alex] were able …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

It’s generally understood that most vehicles that humans interact with on a daily basis are used with some kind of hand controlled interface. However, this build from [Avisha Kumar]  and [Leul Tesfaye] showcases a rather different take. A single motion input provides both steer and foward/reverse throttle control.

The project consists of a small car, driven with electric motors at the rear, with a servo-controlled caster at the front for steering. Controlled is provided through PIC32 microcontroller receiving signals via Bluetooth. The car is commanded with a hand controller, quite literally — consisting of an accelerometer measuring pitch and roll …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The Internet of Things is eating everything alive, and the world wants to know: how do you make a small, battery-powered, WiFi-enabled microcontroller device? This is a surprisingly difficult problem. WiFi is not optimized for low-power operations. It’s power-hungry, and there’s a lot of overhead. That said, there are microcontrollers out there with WiFi capability, but how do they hold up to running off of a battery for days, or weeks? That’s what [TvE] is exploring in a fantastic multi-part series of posts delving into low-power WiFi microcontrollers.

The idea for these experiments is set up in the first post …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Communicating with microcontrollers and other embedded systems requires a communications standard. SPI is a great one, and is commonly used, but it’s not the only one available. There’s also I2C which has some advantages and disadvantages compared to SPI. The problem with both standards, however, is that modern computers don’t come with either built-in. To solve that problem and allow easier access to debugging in SPI, [James Bowman] built the SPIDriver a few months ago, and is now back by popular demand with a similar device for I2C, the I2CDriver.

Much like the SPIDriver, the I2C driver is a debugging …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Given the popularity of hacking and repurposing Amazon Dash buttons, there appears to be a real need amongst tinkerers for a simple “do something interesting on the internet when a button is pressed” device. If you have this need but don’t feel like fighting to bend a Dash device to your will, take a look at [Kevin Darrah]’s trigBoard instead.

The trigBoard is a battery-powered, ESP8266-based board that includes some clever circuitry to help it barely sip power (less than one microamp!) while waiting to be triggered by a digital input. This input could be a magnetic reed switch, push …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When using an Arduino, at least once you’ve made it past blinking LEDs, you might start making use of the serial connection to send and receive information from the microcontroller. Communicating with the board while it’s interacting with its environment is a crucial way to get information in real-time. Usually, that’s as far as it goes, but [Pieter] wanted to take it a step farther than that with his command line interpreter (CLI) for the Arduino.

The CLI allows the user to run Unix-like commands directly on the Arduino. This means control of GPIO and the rest of the features …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Building your own weather station is a fun project in itself, but building it to be self-sufficient and off-grid adds another set of challenges to the mix. You’ll need a battery and a solar panel to power the station, which means adding at least a regulator and charge controller to your build. If the panel and battery are small, you’ll also need to make some power-saving tweaks to the code as well. (Google Translate from Italian) The tricks that [Danilo Larizza] uses in his build are useful for more than just weather stations though, they’ll be perfect for anyone trying …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Hackaday regular [befinitiv] wrote into the tip line to let us know about a hack you might enjoy, wireless UART output from a bare STM32 microcontroller. Desiring the full printf debugging experience, but constrained both by available space and expense, [befinitiv] was inspired to improvise by a similar hack that used the STM32 to send Morse code over standard FM frequencies.

In this case, [befinitiv]’s solution is both more useful and slightly more legal, as the software uses the 27 MHz ISM band to blast out ASK modulated serial data through a simple wire antenna attached to one of the …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Most of the DIY smartwatch projects we feature here on Hackaday aren’t exactly what most people would consider practical daily-use devices. Clunky designs, short battery life, limited functions: they’re more a wearable display of geek cred than they are functional timepieces. Oddly enough, the same could be said of many of the “real” smartwatches on the market, so perhaps the DIY versions are closer to the state-of-the-art than we thought.

But this ESP8266 smartwatch created by [Shyam Ravi] is getting dangerously close to something you could unironically leave the house with. It’s still missing an enclosure that prevents you from …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

One of the most famous pieces of computer-generated music is the Deep Note, the audio trademark for THX. It begins with a dozen or so voices, randomly tuned between 200 and 400 Hz, then glissandos to a frequency spread of three octaves. Put that through a few thousand watts of a speaker system, play it before Jedi, and the audience will be listening.

The original THX Deep Note was created on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware running 20,000 lines of code, but that was in 1983. Now we have cheap microcontrollers, so of course, you can …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

One of the biggest advantages of using the ESP8266 in your projects is how easy it is to get WiFi up and running. Just plug in the WiFi library, put the SSID and encryption key in your source code, and away you go. It authenticates with your network in seconds and you can get on with building your project. But things get a little trickier if you want to take your project someplace else, or distribute your source code to others. Quickly we learn the downside of using static variables for authentication.

While there are already a few solutions to …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

As far as ESP8266 boards go, the WeMos D1 Mini is a great choice if you’re looking to get started with hackerdom’s microcontroller du jour. It’s small, well supported, and can be had ridiculously cheap. Often going for as little as $3 USD each, we buy the things in bulk just to have spares on hand. But that’s not to say it’s a perfect board. For one, it lacks the customary mounting holes which would allow you to better integrate it into finished products.

This minor annoyance was enough to spring [Martin Raynsford] into action. He noticed there was some …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The modern social-networking fueled Internet loves two things more than anything: pets, and watching other people do stuff. There’s probably a scroll tucked behind a filing cabinet at Vint Cerf’s house that foretells anyone who can harness these two elements will gain control of the Internet Ready Player One style. If so, we’re thinking [Tyler Pearce] is well on his way to ascending the throne.

In an effort to make the Overwatch Twitch streams of his betrothed even more enticing, [Tyler] came up with a way for viewers to feed their dog Larry by dropping a command in the chat. …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Importing cheap equipment and test gear is something of a mixed blessing. It allows you to outfit your lab without emptying your bank account, but on the other hand there’s usually a reason it’s cheap. Of course, the retail price of a piece of hardware shouldn’t be the metric by which we measure its quality, but there’s got to be a few corners cut someplace when they are selling this stuff for a fraction of what the name brands are charging.

A perfect example is the ZHIYU ZPB30A1 electronic load, available from various online importers for about $30 USD. While …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

If your interest has been piqued by the inexpensive wireless-enabled goodness of the ESP8266 microcontroller, but you have been intimidated by the slightly Wild-West nature of the ecosystem that surrounds it, help is at hand. [Alexander] is creating a series of ESP8266 tutorials designed to demystify the component and lead even the most timid would-be developer to a successful first piece of code.

If you cast your mind back to 2014 when the ESP8266 first emerged, it caused great excitement but had almost no information surrounding it. You could buy it on a selection of modules, but there were no …read more

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Our entire life is staring at glowing rectangles, and all our surroundings are hard, flat surfaces. [Ben] had the idea to turn those flat surfaces into a generic tap interface controller, and his project for the Hackaday Prize might just do that.

Some of the prior art that went into this project includes Ping Pong Plus Plus, an augmented-reality-ish implementation of ping pong that puts projected light wherever a ping pong ball hits the table. The game does this by mounting piezos to the bottom of a table and just a slight bit of math to determine where on the …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

You’ve probably noticed that the hacker world is somewhat enamored with overly complex electronic event badges. Somewhere along the line, we went from using a piece of laminated paper on a lanyard to custom designed gadgets that pack in enough hardware that they could have passed for PDAs not that long ago. But what if there was a way to combine this love for weighing down one’s neck with silicon jewelry and the old school “Hello my name is…” stickers?

[Squaro Engineering] might have the solution with Badgy, their multi-function e-ink name…well, badge. Compatible with the Arduino SDK, it can …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

It’s really hard to overstate how awesome ESP8266 development boards like the Wemos D1 Mini really are. For literally a couple of dollars you can get a decently powerful Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller that has enough free digital pins to do some useful work. Like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi before it, the ESP8266 is a device that’s opening up whole new areas of hacking and development that simply weren’t as practical or cost-effective as previously.

As a perfect example, take a look at this stupendously simple Internet-connected motion detector that [Eric William] has come up with. With just a Wemos …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Every scrap of power is precious when it comes to power harvesting, and working with such designs usually means getting cozy with a microcontroller’s low-power tricks and sleep modes. But in the case of the Ultra Low Power Energy Harvester design by [bobricius], the attached microcontroller doesn’t need to worry about managing power at all — as long as it can finish its job fast enough.

The idea is to use solar energy to fill a capacitor, then turn on the microcontroller and let it run normally until the power runs out. As a result, a microcontroller may only have …read more

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As we all know, sometimes the projects we plan simply never materialize. You have an idea, maybe even buy some of the parts you need, and then…nothing. Maybe you changed your mind, or maybe the idea was never that good to begin with. In any event, time marches on, the parts pile up, and the ideas come and go. Such is the life of the hacker.

[Andrius Mikonis] writes in to tell us how his graveyard of abandoned projects ended up providing exactly what he needed to embark on a project he’s been fascinated with for years: the two-wheel self …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Assuming you have a child and it’s no longer womb-bound, there’s a fairly high chance they’ve already had some experience with the glowing beauty that is the LCD display; babies of only a few months old are often given a tablet or smartphone to keep them occupied. But as the child gets to the age where they are capable of going outside or doing something more constructive, staring slack-jawed and wide-eyed at their tablet becomes a concern for many parents.

[Richard Garsthagen] is one such parent. He wanted a way to monitor and control how much time his children were …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

While many of the Arduino platforms are great tools for gaining easy access to microcontrollers, there are a few downsides. Price and availability may be the highest on the list, and for those reasons, some have chosen to deploy their own open-source Arduino-compatible boards.

The latest we’ve seen is the Franzininho, an Arduino Gemma-like board that’s based on the ATtiny85, a capable but tiny microcontroller by Atmel in a compact 8-pin configuration. This board has everything the Gemma has, including a built-in LED and breakout pins. One of the other perks of the Franzininho over the Gemma is that everything …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

We’ve featured a number of people who’ve taken the plunge and created their own customized keyboard; at this point it’s safe to say that there’s enough information and source code out there that anyone who’s looking to build their own board won’t have much trouble figuring out how to do so. That being said, it’s nice to have a comprehensive at a process from start to finish. Why sift through forum posts and image galleries looking for crumbs if you don’t have to?

That’s precisely what makes this write-up by [Maarten Tromp] so interesting. He walks the reader through every …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

In 2012, [Bruno] wanted to detect some bats. Detect bats? Some varieties of bat (primarily the descriptively named “microbats”) locate themselves and their prey in space using echolocation, the same way your first robot probably did. The bat emits chirps from their adorably tiny larynx the same way a human uses its vocal cords to produce sound. The bat then listens for an echo of that sound and can make inferences about the location of its presumed prey in the volume around it. Bat detectors are devices which can detect these ultrasonic sounds and shift them into a range that …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

It’s said that the electronic devices we use on a daily basis, particularly cell phones, could be so much smaller than they are if only the humans they’re designed for weren’t so darn big and clumsy. That’s only part of the story — battery technology has a lot to do with overall device size — but it’s true that chips can be made a whole lot smaller than they are currently, and are starting to bump into the limit of being able to handle them without mechanical assistance.

Or perhaps not, if [mitxela]’s hand-soldering of a tiny ball-grid array chip …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Today, SiFive has released two new cores designed for the lower end of computing. This adds to the company’s existing portfolio of microcontrollers and SoCs based on the Open RISC-V ISA. Over the last two years, SiFive has introduced a number of cores based on the RISC-V ISA, an Open Architecture ISA that gives anyone to design and develop a microcontroller or microprocessor platform. These two new cores fill out the low-power end of SiFive’s core portfolio.

The two new cores included in the announcement are the SiFive E20 and E21, both meant for low-power applications, and according to SiFive …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When [rbaron] started a new job, he got a goodie bag. The contents included a cheap fitness tracker bracelet that used Bluetooth LE. Since this is Hackaday, you can probably guess what happened next: hacking ensued.

For something cheap enough to give away, [rbaron] claims it cost $10, the device has quite a bit in it. In the very tiny package, there is an OLED display, a battery, a vibration motor, and a Nordic 32-bit ARM with BLE. The FCC ID was key to identifying the device. Opening the case, which was glued down, was pretty difficult, but doable with …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The ESP8266 has become practically the 555 chip of WiFi connected microcontrollers. Traditionally, you’d buy one on a little breakout board with some pins and a few connectors, and then wire up anything else you need. The ESP8266’s big brother, the ESP32, hasn’t quite taken over from the ESP8266, but it has a lot more power and many more options. [Andreas] has a new video that shows seven new ESP32 boards that have integral displays. These boards can simplify a lot of applications where you need both WiFi and a user interface.

Of the boards examined, six of them have …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

When [Steve Parker]’s girlfriend got a tea kettle that takes voice commands, he suddenly saw his fancy bean-to-cup coffee machine as a technological dinosaur. It may make good coffee, but getting the DeLonghi going is inconvenient, because it runs a self-cleaning cycle each time it’s turned on or off.

Thus began [Steve]’s adventure in trying to turn the thing on with Alexa via Particle Photon. Because of the way the machine is designed, simply adding a relay wouldn’t do—the machine would just turn off and back on, only to start the self-clean again. Once inside, he found it’s controlled by …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

It never fails — we post a somewhat simple project using a microcontroller and someone points out that it could have been accomplished better with a 555 timer or discrete transistors or even a couple of vacuum tubes. We welcome the critiques, of course; after all, thoughtful feedback is the point of the comment section. Sometimes the anti-Arduino crowd has a point, but as [Great Scott!] demonstrates with this microcontroller-less boost converter, other times it just makes sense to code your way out of a problem.

Built mainly as a comeback to naysayers on his original boost-converter circuit, which relied …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

A few years ago, Adafruit launched the Feather 32u4 Basic Proto. This tiny development board featured — as you would expect — an ATMega32u4 microcontroller, a USB port, and a battery charging circuit for tiny LiPo batteries. It was, effectively, a small Arduino clone with a little bit of extra circuitry that made it great for portable and wearable projects. In the years since, and as Adafruit has recently pointed out, the Adafruit Feather has recently become a thing. This is a new standard. Maxim is producing compatible ‘wings’ or shields. If you’re in San Fransisco, the streets are …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

With the size of electronic parts and batteries these days, very small items are obviously becoming more and more viable. [Yann Guidon] has made some awesome pieces of LED jewelry using a minimal number of surface mount parts and a small lithium-ion battery. To make the jewelry stand out a bit, other than just blinking on and off, these LEDs blink a short message in Morse code.

This is an update and open sourcing of some work that [Yann] did a few years ago, and the iterations have resulted in a smaller design. But the main part of the latest …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

It’s not every project write-up that opens with a sentence like “I had this TURBOVAC 50 turbomolecular pump laying around…”, but then again not every write-up comes from someone with a lab as stuffed full of goodies as that of [Niklas Fauth]. His pump had an expired controller board, so he’s created an open-source controller of his own centred upon an STM32. Intriguingly he mentions its potential use as “I want to do more stuff with sputtering and Ion implantation in the future“, as one does of course.

So given that probably not many Hackaday readers have a …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Frustrated by the glut of unsecured IoT devices? So are Microsoft. And they’re using custom Linux and hardware to do something about it.

Microsoft have announced a new ecosystem for secure IoT devices called “Azure Sphere.” This system is threefold: Hardware, Software, and Cloud. The hardware component is a Microsoft-certified microcontroller which contains Microsoft Pluton, a hardware security subsystem. The first Microsoft-certified Azure Sphere chip will be the MediaTek MT3620, launching this year. The software layer is a custom Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is more capable than the average Real-Time OS (RTOS) common to low-powered IoT devices. Yes, that’s …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Anyone who’s ever written more than a dozen or so lines of code knows that debugging is a part of life in our world. Anyone who’s written code for microcontrollers knows that physical debugging is a part of our life as well. Atmel processors use a serial communications protocol called debugWire, which is a simpler version of JTAG and allows full read/write access to all registers and allows one to single step, break, etc. [Nerd Ralph], a prominent fixture here at Hackaday has dug into the AVR debugWire protocol and enlightened us with some valuable information.

While the protocol side …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Many of you will have experimented with driving displays from your microcontroller projects, and for most people that will mean pretty simple status information for which you’d use standard libraries and not care much about their performance. If however any of you have had the need for quickly-updating graphics such as video or game content, you may have found that simpler software solutions aren’t fast enough. If you are an ESP32 user then, [Louis Beaudoin] may have some good news for you, because he has ported the SmartMatrix library to that platform. We’ve seen his demo in action, and the …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Connecting computers to human brains is currently limited to the scope of science fiction and a few cutting-edge laboratories. Tapping into some nerves farther from our central wetware is possible and [Peter Buczkowski] shows us his stylish machine for implanting a pattern into our brains without actively having to memorize anything.

His Medium Machine leverages a TENS unit to activate forearm muscles in a pattern programmed into an Arduino. Users place their forearm across two aluminum electrodes mounted on a tasteful wooden platform and extend a single finger over a button. Electrical impulses trigger the muscles which press the button. …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Zephyr is an open source real-time operating system (RTOS) that appeared on the scene a few years ago with support for a few boards. The new 1.11 release adds a lot of features, a lot of new boards, and also has a Windows development environment. But don’t worry, the environment is portable so it still runs on Linux and Mac, as well.

The OS has support for many ARM and x86 boards. It also supports ESP32, NIOS II, and can also target Linux which is useful for debugging or studying execution using desktop tools.

It’s not short of features, being …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

The Internet of Things is a cancer that consumes all reasonable expectations of technology, opens vast security holes we’ve never had to deal with before, and complicates life in the pursuit of quarterly gains from whatever technology startup is hot right now. We are getting some interesting tech out of it, though. The latest in the current round of ‘I can’t believe someone would build that’ is the Internet of Pillows. No, it’s not a product, it’s just an application note, but it does allow us to laugh at the Internet of Things while simultaneously learning about some really cool …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Kniwwelino is the latest in a line of micro:bit-inspired projects that we’ve seen, but this one comes with a twist: it uses an ESP8266 and WiFi at the core instead of the nR51 ARM/BTLE chip. That means that students can connect via laptop, cellphone, or anything else that can get onto a network.

That’s not the only tradeoff, though. In order to get the price down, the Kniwwelino drops the accelerometer/magnetometer of the micro:bit for a programmable RGB LED. With fewer pins to break out, the Kniwwelino is able to ditch the love-it-or-hate-it card-edge connector of the micro:bit as well. …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Sometimes the best part of building something is getting to rebuild it again a little farther down the line. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes when we start a project we don’t even know where the end is going to be. It’s a starting point, not an end destination. Who wants to do something once when you could do it twice? Maybe even three times for good measure?

That’s what happened when [Ryan] decided to build a wireless “party button” for his kids. Tied into his Home Assistant automation system, a smack of the button plays music throughout the house and …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Sometimes you have to switch a light. Maybe it’s an LED but sometimes it’s mains-powered. That’s not too hard, a transistor and a relay should do it. If you have to switch more lights, that’s not too bad either, as long as your microcontroller has enough free GPIOs. But, if you need to switch a large number of lights, like 256 of them, for example, you’re going to need something else.

[Jan]’s project didn’t switch quite that many lights, but 157 of them is still enough of a chore to need a creative solution so he decided to use a …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

Rust Programming Langauge has grown by leaps and bounds since it was announced in 2010 by Mozilla. It has since become a very popular language owing to features such as memory safety and its ownership system. And now, news has arrived of an Embedded Devices Working Group for Rust aiming at improving support for microcontrollers.

Rust is quite similar to C++ in terms of syntax, however Rust does not allow for null or dangling pointers which makes for more reliable code in the hands of a newbie. With this new initiative, embedded development across different microcontroller architectures could see a …read more

Tags:  microcontrollers  

[Jacques] thought his doorbell was too loud, so of course the first thing that came to mind was replacing the electronics and playing a WAV file of his choosing every time someone came knocking. What he ended up with is a very neat circuit: he used a six-pin microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM to [...]

Tags:  wav file ram jacques pin-microcontroller wav-file doorbell microcontrollers  

Many motors offer a quadrature encoder that give feedback on whether, and in which direction, the motor shaft is moving. But if you’re clever about analyzing the data you can use a quadrature encoder to estimate motor velocity. [Jason Sachs] makes the case that it’s fairly easy to get this wrong. Lucky for us he [...]

Tags:  encoder quadrature velocity jason-sachs motor-shaft sachs microcontrollers  

An awful lot of microcontroller projects use timers to repeat an action every few minutes, hours, or days. While these timers can be as accurate as a cheap digital wrist watch, there are times when you need a microcontroller’s timer to measure exactly, losing no more than a few milliseconds a day. It’s not very hard [...]

Tags:  avr microcontroller accurate microcontroller-projects milliseconds wrist-watch microcontrollers  

To the casual observer this flower looks nice as its illuminated center fades in and out. But there’s hidden meaning to that light. Some of the blinks are longer than others; this flower is using Morse Code. [Renaud Schleck] wanted to try a few different things with his MSP430 microcontroller. He decided on an LED [...]

Tags:  flower something code morse-code morse renaud-schleck schleck msp430 microcontrollers  

We’re all familiar with overclocking desktop computers; a wonderful introduction to thermal design power and the necessities of a good CPU cooler. [Marcelo] wanted to see how far he could overclock a microcontroller – in this case an ATMega328 – and ended up with a microcontroller designed for 20 MHz running at 30 MHz. To [...]

Tags:  cpu-cooler microcontrollers desktop-computers microcontrollers  

[Steven Mackaay] added a simple user interface that implements a shutoff timer for his desk lamp. His project log comes in two parts, the breadboarding and the actual implementation. He wanted a few things out of the build. The first is an LED that would help him find the lamp in the dark. The second [...]

Tags:  desk lamp timer steven-mackaay desk-lamp breadboarding user-interface microcontrollers  

Hackaday’s own [Jeremy Cook] has been testing out the pyMCU board and managed to put together an animated block head that looks like it could be a foe in Minecraft. That’s thanks mostly to the block of foam he’s using as a diffuser. The face of the project is a set of LEDs. These, along [...]

Tags:  pymcu minecraft project jeremy-cook test-project foe microcontrollers  

For playing around with video signals and trying to create a an interesting microcontroller project, you can’t do better than the classic Pong. We’ve seen our share of microcontroller-based pong builds, but rarely have we seen an 8-pin microcontroller recreate every part of the first video game. [Tim] started his PIC12F1840-based Pong build with just [...]

Tags:  video microcontroller pong tim classic-pong microcontroller-project video-signals microcontrollers  

Powerful graphics cards are pretty affordable these days. Even though we rarely do high-end gaming on our daily machine we still have a GeForce 9800 GT. That goes to waste on a machine used mainly to publish posts and write code for microcontrollers. But perhaps we can put the GPU to good use when it comes [...]

Tags:  gpu machine leveraging linux-kernel powerful-graphics microcontrollers linux hacks  

An IFF system – Identification of Friend or Foe – are used by military aircraft in battle situations to determine if another aircraft is being piloted by a fellow aviator or an enemy. For the boots on the ground, friendly fire is generally regarded as a very bad thing, so a few students in [Bruce [...]

Tags:  aircraft system iff bruce fellow-aviator friendly-fire military-aircraft microcontrollers  

If you’re into microcontrollers you know the ability to think and perform math in binary is a must. [Joe Ptiz] has been looking for a way to keep from being distract by the math when coding while still keeping the binary strings in the forefront of his mind. The solution he came up with is [...]

Tags:  friend python math joe-ptiz binary-strings forefront microcontrollers  

Here’s an interesting tip that can help improve your ability to write assembly code. In an effort to remove the complexity of assembly code for an AVR project [Quinn Dunki] figured out how to use macros when writing AVR code with the GNU toolchain. Anyone using AVR-GCC should keep this in mind if they ever [...]

Tags:  code assembly avr gnu-toolchain quinn-dunki macro-assembly microcontrollers  

Check out the game of chess going on above. It’s a virtual game where each player uses a glove as the controller. Or course the game board and pieces are missing from this image. They’re displayed on a computer monitor which both players can see. The hardware rather simple, and we think it would be [...]

Tags:  game glove chess virtual-chess game-of-chess virtual-game microcontrollers  

This is a Geiger counter which charts its readings on a webpage. [Radu Motisan] put a lot of time into the build and it shows. This thing is packed with features and the hardware choices were the best combinations found through several iterations of development. In addition to radiation levels the sensor unit takes several [...]

Tags:  online station radiation geiger-counter hardware-choices radiation-monitoring microcontrollers  

This video game gives your thumbs a rest while stretching those vocal chords. The pair of microphones seen above control the video game on the LCD display. Saying “Biu” will launch a projectile while “ahh” adjusts the flight path. The system was developed by [Tian Gao] as a final project for his ECE 4760 course [...]

Tags:  video game biu flight-path vocal-chords projectile microcontrollers  

Here’s a rather exciting development for those who work with MSP430 microcontrollers. [M-atthias] worked out a way to implement USB 1.1 on a MSP430G2452. He’s bit banging the communications as this hardware normally doesn’t support the Universal Serial Bus. This is much like using the V-USB stack for AVR micros. The test hardware seen above uses an [...]

Tags:  msp usb bit universal-serial-bus test-hardware microcontrollers microcontrollers  

[Andrew Smallbone] wrote in with a link to his latest open source project. This is phatIO, a USB I/O device that uses a mass storage file system for control. The idea is that any operating system can manipulate files on a USB storage device. This enumerates as mass storage, and any alterations you make to [...]

Tags:  storage phatio system andrew-smallbone usb-storage-device mass-storage-file-system open-source-project microcontrollers  

[Steve] created an AVR programmer using an old USB keyboard. We feature a bunch of AVR programmers, but this one is made from parts that many people will have lying around. There are two components: the controller PCB from a USB keyboard, and an optocoupler for emulating key presses. In order to send data to [...]

Tags:  keyboard usb avr steve avr-programmers avr-programmer optocoupler microcontrollers  

[100uf] built an LED matrix shield for the MSP430 launchpad. His goal with this design was to have it play Conway’s Game of Life. It does just that, as you can see in the clip after the break. But it’s just waiting to learn some more tricks. After he tires of watching the cellular automaton he can [...]

Tags:  launchpad msp game cellular-automaton game-of-life conway microcontrollers  

Wanting to test his skills by building a webserver [Cnlohr] decided to also code a Minecraft server which allows him to toggle pins from inside the game. The rows of switches seen above give him direct access to the direction register and I/O pins of one port of the ATmega328. The server hardware is shown [...]

Tags:  server toggle minecraft server-hardware virtual-world direct-access microcontrollers  

If you’re flying through the air in a non-powered vehicle your rate of descent is something that you want to keep any eye one. With that in mind, [Adrian] decided to design his own Variometer (translated) what will have a place in the cockpit next to the other instrumentation. It emits a pitch whose frequency is dictated [...]

Tags:  variometer air aircraft adrian cockpit instrumentation pitch microcontrollers  

If you’re into adding electronics to your wearable items this little board will be of interest. The 1.6″x1.6″ board is called SquareWear and comes in several different flavors. It may be a bit of a surprise that this is not an Arduino compatible board. [Ray] tried a few projects with PIC microcontrollers and ended up [...]

Tags:  board squarewear microcontroller ray pic-microcontrollers compatible-board microcontroller-board microcontrollers  

If you’re looking for a way to push your comfort zone with that slick new microcontroller you’ve been working with we think [Morgan Gangwere] has the answer. He took his chipKit development board and used it as a demoscene platform. Demoscene refers to audio and visual demos written to squeeze as much entertainment out of [...]

Tags:  dev-board microcontroller comfort-zone microcontrollers  

[John] wrote in with a solution to a prototyping issue that has vexed us for quite some time. Above you can see the DIP friendly solution for dual-row pin headers which he came up with. With just a bit of easy soldering he now has a breadboard friendly device for prototyping. He starts by soldering [...]

Tags:  dip breadboard pin john dual-row pin-headers pin-header microcontrollers  

Whenever we hear about ECE 4760 we take notice. That’s because a ton of fantastic hacked together projects have resulted from the class. It’s offered at Cornell University and focuses on designing projects based on microcontrollers. We look at it as a ‘how to connect everything to your microcontroller’ guide. The good news for you [...]

Tags:  ece cornell lecture cornell-university microcontrollers microcontroller microcontrollers  

[Jay Kickliter] sent in his latest electronic business card. This time, his goal was to make it much cheaper so he could actually afford to give it away. He did pretty well considering the two week timeline he mentions. This card is using an MSP430 with the capsense library to light up some LEDs any [...]

Tags:  business capacitive card jay-kickliter electronic-business-card msp430 leds microcontrollers  

A couple of things strike us about this 8-voice 32 kHz synthesizer. First is the cleanliness of the prototype. As you can see, each part has plenty of room on its own board and all are interconnected by 10-pin IDC ribbon connectors. But you’ll have to see the video after the break to enjoy the [...]

Tags:  khz voice synthesizer cleanliness microcontrollers  

Back in 2011 we did a short roundup of some popular development boards.  We promised a follow up at some point, and that time is near.  We would really like to make this a fairly comprehensive list and there are always suggestions sent in after the article that we overlooked. This time, we’re asking that [...]

Tags:  board development time roundup development-boards microcontrollers  

[Timothy] is honing his microcontroller skills with this electronic dice project. In addition to giving him an opportunity to work on some code, the use of an 8-pin chip provides a design challenge for driving the twelve pips and providing a user input. The project started off with some $4 strings of LED Christmas lights. [...]

Tags:  pair pic microcontroller timothy led-christmas-lights electronic-dice pin-chip microcontrollers  

Here’s an external display meant to help you keep track of your computer’s status. It connects via USB and is driven by a PIC microcontroller. It listens for a small set of commands, using those to implement a simple control protocol to drive the screen. [Andrew Gehringer] designed the device around a PIC 18F2550, which offers [...]

Tags:  lcd display pic andrew-gehringer pic-microcontroller control-protocol microcontrollers  

We’ve seen NES, SNES, Sega, and just about every weird controller Atari put out connected to microcontrollers, but connecting the N64 controller to a project has remained one of those seldom-seen, rarely copied endeavors, not often tackled by makers around the globe. [Pieter-Jan] decided to throw his hat in the ring and give reading an [...]

Tags:  controller microcontroller nes pieter-jan n64-controller microcontrollers  

[Nakul], [Nikilesh], and [Nischal] just finished posting about their entry in the 2012 Open 7400 Logic competition. It’s an encryption system based entirely on 7400 logic chips. The device operates on 8-bit binary numbers, which limits its real-world applications. But we bet they learned a lot during the development process. The encryption algorithm is based on a [...]

Tags:  encryption project logic logic-chips encryption-algorithm nischal microcontrollers  

[John] from MIT is working on a project to bring a little bit of interactivity to the hacks he does. Because his hacks receive much more attention on the Internet than in real life, [John] made it so clicking a button in your browser can change something in the real world. He calls his creation [...]

Tags:  internet fabulously touchit john interactivity hacks real-world microcontrollers  

This soldering nightmare is a configurable RFID tag which has been built from 7400-series logic chips. The beast of a project results in an iPhone-sized module which can be used as your new access card for security systems that uses the 125 kHz tags. The best part is that a series of switches makes the [...]

Tags:  logic tag rfid logic-chips rfid-tag iphone microcontrollers  

If you want to mess around with some microcontrollers but don’t really have a purpose in mind this project is perfect for you. It’s cheap, easy to assemble, and there’s blinking LEDs! [TigerUp] shows us how he  put together some LED matrix pendants using just five components. He calls the project Tiny Matrix, which is [...]

Tags:  led matrix project microcontrollers pendants hacks  

We see a lot of microcontroller based hacks around here, and it’s not hard to see why learning how to use microcontrollers is valuable to prospective engineeer. Unfortunately, microcontroller courses are dreaded by students since they focus on theory instead of application. In The First Lecure, [Colin] talks to a class of engineering students about [...]

Tags:  microcontroller engineering motivating colin engineering-students microcontrollers hacks news  

Here’s another offering when it comes to PIC programming from the Raspberry Pi. The design seeks to adapt the GPIO header so that it may be used for programming PIC microcontrollers, but this does involve a bit more than just physically connecting pins to the target chip. Most of the PIC family require a 12V [...]

Tags:  raspberry pic Programming pic-microcontrollers programming-pic pic-programming microcontrollers  

[Gpuhackr] chose his username to explain exactly how he spends his time. For instance, here he’s using an STM32 Discovery board to drive an AMD Radeon HD 2400 graphics card. The ARM microcontroller isn’t actually using the PCIe interface on the card. Instead, [Gpuhackr] has patched into the debugging interface built into the card itself. This [...]

Tags:  stm card pcie pcie-video-card graphics-card microcontrollers  

[André Sarmento] needed to connect a computer to an RS-485 bus. A simple converter can be sourced online, but the only thing he could find locally that was even close was a USB to RS-232 converter. He used that component to craft his own USB to RS-485 bridge. RS-485 is often used for remote sensors [...]

Tags:  adapter converter usb rs-485 rs-232 sensors microcontrollers  

Like many of us, [Jon] began his journey through the magical world of microcontrollers with an Arduino. For a beginner, the Arduino is a wonderful tool, but [Jon] quickly found himself limited by the platform. There are too few pins on the Arduino, and and the platform doesn’t really lend itself to extremely complex projects. [...]

Tags:  freesoc arduino platform jon magical-world microcontrollers kickstarter  

[Andrew] picked up a handful of these big STC 8051 chips for a song and dance. The problem he has with them is the clunky VB6 programming software that only wants to run on a Windows box. He buckled down and wrote his own programming software called stcdude. As you have probably guessed, it’s meant [...]

Tags:  stcdude Programming Software andrew windows-box programming-software vb6 microcontrollers  

[Limpkin] decided to give the whole embedded business card thing a try. Here is his finished project, a low-profile mass storage business card that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Sure, the $6 price tag could score him a hundred paper cards, but those don’t light up like this one does! The main components [...]

Tags:  business card limpkin storage-business paper-cards microcontrollers  

Search around the Internet and you’ll find a landfill of forum threads asking how to drive the LCD screen from a dead laptop. The answer is always that there is just no way to do it. That’s because most of them use a Low-Voltage Differential Signalling protocol that just isn’t available through the hardware used [...]

Tags:  fpga lvds reuse low-voltage-differential forum-threads lcds microcontrollers  

Webkeys are small, inexpensive USB devices which launch a web browser when plugged into a computer. They’re given out as a promotional item, but they can be fun to hack as well. [Brad Antoniewicz] recently got his hands on one and decided to crack it open to see what he could accomplish. The majority of [...]

Tags:  webkeys usb disassembling brad-antoniewicz promotional-item usb-devices microcontrollers  

[Jordan] writes in to show us a project he has been working on called MbedConsole. Living up its name [Jordan] has managed to run a 640×480 VGA output, PS/2 port and console all from the mbed itself. We really mean from an mbed only; no extra hardware is required aside from a few resistors and [...]

Tags:  mbedconsole vga project jordan vga-output resistors ps-2 microcontrollers  

Imagine you’re stuck on a desert island, hundreds of miles away from the nearest person, and you finally have time to finish that project you’re working on. You have a single microcontroller, but you’re lacking a computer and you need to program an ATtiny13. How do you do it? [androidruberoid] figured out how to manually flash [...]

Tags:  Programming microcontroller time desert-island hundreds-of-miles attiny13 microcontrollers  

Over the last few years, [Michael] has been developing a PIC microcontroller board. He calls his project USBPIC, and with the addition of a few FET drivers, H-bridges, and LED drivers his homemade dev board can handle just about anything thrown at it. [Michael]‘s board is build around a PIC18F2455 microcontroller with both an In Circuit [...]

Tags:  board usbpic anything michael microcontroller-board pic-microcontroller dev-board microcontrollers  

We’ve been living a life of luxury, writing our microcontroller code in a text editor and using — of all things — a compiler to turn it into something the chip can use. [Dan Amlund Thomsen] shows us a different way of doing things. He’s actually crafting the operation codes for a PIC microcontroller by [...]

Tags:  code pic microcontroller dan-amlund microcontroller-code op-code pic-microcontroller microcontrollers  

[blueHash] uses this cheap development board as an AVR programmer. What’s interesting to us is that it solves the chicken-or-egg problem that is usually encountered when bootstrapping a programmer. We’ve written about this issue before. Most programmers use microcontrollers, which first need to be flashed using a programmer. But it turns out the chip on [...]

Tags:  programmer bluehash avr egg-problem microcontrollers microcontrollers  

[Blark] picked up a couple of Commodore 64 machines on Craig’s List so that he could play around with the SID chips inside. But there’s some other fun stuff in there and his attention was drawn to the PROM which stores the kernel. He thought it would be a fun adventure to build a ROM [...]

Tags:  dumping kernel fun craig sid sid-chips commodore-64 fun-stuff microcontrollers  

Meet the Art Controller, a new dev board available over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. It provides a drop-in solution for switching higher voltage loads (but not mains). The thing we like most about it is the ability to alter a switching delay without reprogramming the firmware. The board uses an ATtiny2313 for control. It’s [...]

Tags:  timing board relay art-controller relay-board mad-scientist dev-board microcontrollers  

ST Microelectronics keeps kicking out development boards to show off their new ARM processor line. Yesterday they issued a press release announcing the STM32 F3 Discovery Board. As their naming scheme implies, this carries an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, but compared to the F0 Discovery board (which we loved) it’s got several extra goodies built into [...]

Tags:  stm board discovery st-microelectronics dev-board processor-line microcontrollers  

[Andrea “Mancausoft” Milazzo] has been restoring old equipment which often contain EPROM chips. He thought he was all set with an EPROM reader which easily dumped the data from 2716 chips and a few others. But he found that the hardware was unable to read 2708 and 2704 chips. His solution was to build a [...]

Tags:  eprom dumper mancausoft andrea eprom-chips eprom-reader milazzo microcontrollers  

This device is a prank or gag that [Eric Heisler] came up with. It will intercept IR remote control codes and play them back after a bit of a delay. The example he shows in the video (embedded after the break) catches the television power signal from a remote, then sends it again after about [...]

Tags:  rickrolling prank control eric-heisler television-power heisler gag microcontrollers  

Here’s the first project we’ve seen for the new Stellaris Launchpad. It’s a frequency analyzer which displays a graph on an 8×8 LED module. What’s that you say? You haven’t received your new Launchpad board yet? Neither have we since they don’t start shipping until the end of the month. But [EuphonistiHack] works as a [...]

Tags:  launchpad frequency analyzer frequency-analyzer stellaris graph microcontrollers  

This game of Bomb Jack is the same as the original arcade version. The difference is that this hardware was built in an FPGA using schematics found on the Internet. We’re a little shocked by the complexity of such a project. We’ve been impressed before by the use of FPGAs to implement classic CRT vector [...]

Tags:  fpga game bomb jack bomb-jack arcade-version classic-coin microcontrollers  

About thirty cents and some wire are all it takes to start hacking extra features into this DX6i transmitter. The DX6i is a six-channel, two-mode transmitter used to control hobby airplanes and helicopters. There are several built-in features but [Ligius] found an easy way to add a few more. In the upper left portion of [...]

Tags:  hobby wire transmitter hobby-airplanes helicopters microcontrollers  

  C’mon, you know you’re not really going to do much today. You might as well spend that time learning some skills instead of watching funny cats. The Cornell ECE lectures on microcontrollers (ECE 4760 and ECE5760), taught by [Bruce Land], are available online for free. Not only do you get to enjoy these two [...]

Tags:  ece cornell time bruce-land funny-cats educational-time microcontrollers hackaday links  

Texas Instruments just open preorders for the new Stellaris LaunchPad. The boards won’t ship until the end of September, but if you don’t mind the wait you can get one for $4.99 including delivery (we’d wager non-U.S. addresses have to pay for delivery, but leave a comment if you know for sure several readers have reported [...]

Tags:  preorder launchpad delivery u.s. stellaris cortex microcontrollers  

A couple of Harvard researchers have developed a method of using digital barometers as a touch sensor. The good news for us is that they’ve open sourced the project, including Eagle board files, firmware, and details about the materials they used. The digital barometers were chosen for their characteristics, availability, and low-cost. The sensor uses an array of Freescale MPL115A2 [...]

Tags:  building touch sensor digital-barometers digital-barometer touch-sensors microcontrollers  

Every AVR microcontroller, from the ATtiny in your thermostat to the ATMega in your Arduino, stores its configuration in a series of fuse bits. These fuse bits control settings such as the multiplier of the internal oscillator (and thus the speed of the chip), or if the reset pin can be used as a GPIO [...]

Tags:  fuse avr microcontroller avr-microcontroller internal-oscillator reset-pin microcontrollers  

Over on the Hackaday forums, [Brian] introduced himself by showing off his new business card. Given his expertise is creating unique circuit boards, we can’t imagine a better way to show off his skills than an ARM-powered business card. [Brian] posted a more detailed write-up on his blog that covers his development process. He decided to use a [...]

Tags:  business card usb brian arm-processor business-card new-business microcontrollers  

As a learning experience [GeriBoss] put together an IR remote control receiver board for his PC. His want of volume control from across the room was reason enough to undertake the project, and he got to work with a 38 kHz receiver module and Manchester encoding in the process. The decoder portion of the project [...]

Tags:  receiver project control pc.-his manchester ir-remote-control manchester-encoding receiver-board microcontrollers  

AVR programmers can be bought for just a few dollars on the Internet, but if you’re building an expansion board with an AVR for your Raspi, this is the build for you. It’s a safe way of programming an AVR via the Raspi’s GPIO pins that uses an extremely minimal circuit. The AVR ISP interface [...]

Tags:  raspberry raspi avr avr-programmer avr-isp gpio microcontrollers  

Atmel’s XMEGA series of microcontrollers are neat little pieces of hardware; with a very fast clock, a ton of IO, USB, and up to 8 UART ports, these neat little chips serve as a nice bridge between AVRs and PICs and the very powerful ARM chips coming out on the market. Unfortunately, the XMEGAs don’t use [...]

Tags:  xmega isp Programming arm-chips avrs little-pieces microcontrollers  

[Natsfr] was looking for a single-sided PCB to host a PIC 18F4550. Not finding one he designed his own in Kicad and is sharing (translated) the spoils of his labor. This chip has USB capabilities which is why we see it used in a ton of projects. Almost all of them (including this USB input device [...]

Tags:  dev usb pic sided-pcb kicad dev-board microcontrollers  

[Giorgio Vazzana] turned his Raspberry Pi into a PIC programmer using a rather small collection of common parts. It supports about a dozen different chips from the 16F family. But we’d guess that software is the limiting factor when it comes to supporting more chips. Generally the problem with PIC programming is the need for [...]

Tags:  raspberry programmer pic pic-programmer pic-programming limiting-factor microcontrollers  

The days of the 8 bit Arduino may be quickly coming to a close. Sure, there will always be a place for AVRs in blinking LEDs and turning on relays, but for doing anything cool – playing MP3s, driving LCD displays, or running a CNC machine – you need the power of a 32 bit [...]

Tags:  ARM age bit arm-chips avrs arduino microcontrollers  

[Chris] continues cranking out the tutorials, this time around he’s showing how to use a CPLD for simple motor control. The demo hardware is pretty basic, he built his own FPGA/CPLD demo board a few years back which used a PLCC socket for easy interfacing. You should be able to use just about any gear [...]

Tags:  cpld motor control chris demo-board plcc-socket microcontrollers  

The Texas Instruments MSP430 Launchpad is pretty popular in hacks, likely due to its low price. TI has recently released a new C2000 Launchpad device that offers more power and peripherals for $17. This board uses the C2000 Piccolo processor, which is meant for DSP applications. Also included is an unrestricted version of the Code [...]

Tags:  launches launchpad texas billy-mays dsp-applications unrestricted-version microcontrollers  

Texas Instruments is trying to take the success it had with the LaunchPad and apply it to other chip architectures. The board seen above is their new C2000 Piccolo LaunchPad. It’s a development board for the F28027 chip. This 32-bit offering is a part we know nothing about. A first look shows a clock speed between 40 [...]

Tags:  launchpad piccolo chip chip-architectures dev-boards clock-speed microcontrollers  

[JMN] took some time to look at the MSP430G2553 mircocontroller (translated). Specifically, he was interested in the clock options and the low power modes. This chip is one of the upgraded processors which have been shipping with the TI Launchpad. Both the MSP430G2553 and MSP430G2452 come with the Launchpad development board. They replace the MSP430G2231 and [...]

Tags:  launchpad msp chip power-modes jmn msp430 microcontrollers  

Get your 8-bit gaming fix with this gaming shield for the TI Launchpad. It’s called the Launchpad GamingPack and was developed as part of TI’s 2012 Intern Design Contest. The team had just six weeks to complete the project. The video after the break starts off with some fast-motion PCB layout. It is followed by [...]

Tags:  launchpad shield gaming design-contest six-weeks microcontrollers  

When working on his quadcopter project [Matt] decided it would be best to build a robust controller for the device. He had never sent off a PCB design for fabrication, but took the plunge and ended up with a compact and reliable PCB on the first try. One of the first things that comes to [...]

Tags:  pcb designing quadcopter matt pcb-design robust-controller plunge microcontrollers  

[Dino] is about three-quarters of the way through his talking box project. He’s completed one of the two boxes, and is showing off the technique he uses to marry motion with sound in order to mimic flapping lips with the box top. You may remember [Dino's] first look at the EMIC2. It’s a single-board text [...]

Tags:  box way project dino three-quarters single-board microcontrollers  

[Matt Evans] took a closer look at the popular (and cheap) STM32F0 Discovery development board and realized he could get a second board out of the deal. The Discovery board is designed to advertise ST Microntroller’s STM32F0 microchip; which with 8k RAM, 64K Flash, a bunch of peripherals,  48MHz clock, and a low price is [...]

Tags:  stm board price k-flash matt-evans microchip closer-look microcontrollers  

[Joe Colosimo] is putting on a show with his PCB business card project. The idea isn’t new, but his goal is to keep it simple and undercut the cost of all other PCB cards he’s seen. This is the third generation of the board design, and he’s just waiting on some solder mask solution before [...]

Tags:  business pcb card joe joe-colosimo solder-mask colosimo putting-on-a-show microcontrollers  

Need a tiny web server? [Rob] over on the 43oh forums made an Ethernet booster pack for the very popular TI MSP430 microcontroller. If that’s not enough, [Rob] also put together an all-in-one solution with a MSP430 and Ethernet controller that can be powered by a battery. Along with the web server that fits in [...]

Tags:  server web msp rob ti-msp430 tiny-web booster-pack microcontrollers  

[Alan Burlison] is working on an Arduino project with an accelerometer and a few LEDs. Having the LEDs light up as his board is tilted to one side or another is an easy enough project a computer cowboy could whip out in an hour, but [Alan] – ever the perfectionist – decided to optimize his [...]

Tags:  tutorial leds project alan-burlison alan computer-cowboy burlison accelerometer microcontrollers  

This is the readout which [Remick] added to his stationary bicycle. It displays heart rate, calories burned, and a few other items to help motivate his workout routine. Back when he was ordering a TI Chronos watch he also picked up a heart rate chest strap and receiver. The receiver can be read using a [...]

Tags:  heart-rate-monitor stationary-bicycle workout-routine microcontrollers  

This digital picture frame physically rotates in order to match the image’s orientation. [Markus Gritsch] built the frame, including a Python script to translate the photos to a format which makes the best use of the 2.4″ LCD screen. The screen is addressed in 8-bit parallel by a PIC 32MX120F032B processor. Image are read from an [...]

Tags:  image frame picture markus-gritsch digital-picture-frame image-orientation microcontrollers  

The Arduino IDE is an abstraction layer for the AVR chip which the board is based around. So it’s no surprise that it is now possible to use the Arduino IDE with the TI Launchpad board. This makes it dead simple for beginners to play around with the inexpensive and low-power MSP430 platform. This is [...]

Tags:  launchpad ide arduino avr-chip abstraction-layer microcontrollers  

Here’s a 6-channel logic analyzer shield for the MSP430 Launchpad. It manages an eyebrow-raising 16 million samples per second. The prototype seen above is made on a hunk of protoboard with point-to-point soldering. [oPossum] did lay out a PCB — which is just 50mmx50mm — but has not had any produced quite yet. He calls [...]

Tags:  analyzer msp logic channel-logic-analyzer protoboard launchpad microcontrollers  

It usually takes a bit of work to gain confidence when it comes to using new parts. [Glitch] got his hands on this OLED display which is manufactured by Sabernetics and wanted to give it a whirl before building a project around it. He grabbed his Bus Pirate to help learn the ins and outs [...]

Tags:  display bench bit bench-tools oled-display whirl microcontrollers  

It seems like hacker-friendly ARM development boards are just exploding into the market right now. Here’s one we haven’t looked at yet. The SolderCore is made by Rowley Associates and is packed with features which help to explain the $80 price tag. [CharlieX] just ordered one and posted a bit about his first day with [...]

Tags:  quick dev soldercore rowley-associates price-tag hacker microcontrollers  

[FlorianH] wanted to get video out working with his BeagleBone but he just couldn’t figure out how to make the kernel play ball. Then a bit of inspiration struck. He knew that if you plug in the official DVI cape (that’s the BeagleBone word for what you may know as a shield) the kernel automatically [...]

Tags:  beaglebone video kernel play-ball inspiration microcontrollers  

The LCD displays for Nokia phones have seen a ton of use as easily interfaced displays for Arduino or other microcontroller projects. Usually, these LCDs are only used for displaying a few lines of text, or if someone is feeling really fancy, a small graph. Shame, then that we don’t see more complicated and computationally [...]

Tags:  video microcontroller bit microcontroller-projects nokia-phones lcd-displays microcontrollers  

Parallax has done something that is unthinkable for most microcontroller manufacturing companies. They’ve decided to throw their support behind an open source toolchain based on GCC. That’s right, instead of fighting to get your code compiling on a platform whose example code uses crippleware, you can actually download, compile, and start using this toolchain without code size [...]

Tags:  code parallax source manufacturing-companies open-source microcontrollers  

Here’s [FlorianH's] setup for driving a PlayStation Portable screen with an FPGA. He’s using the DE0-Nano board to do this, and the first order of business was to establish a way to connect the two. He did a great job of etching his own breakout board, which has some traces that are less than 10 [...]

Tags:  fpga board screen nano playstation-portable order-of-business microcontrollers  

  This setup is used to control a model railroad. Well, not entirely this setup. [Gerhard Bertelsmann] already has a proper railroad controller, and it just happens to offer CAN bus communications. He’s using OpenWRT and a cheap router to connect the bus to the network. Originally he wanted to use a Raspberry Pi board [...]

Tags:  can router bus gerhard-bertelsmann bus-160 openwrt choos microcontrollers  

Yep, that blue light is blinking and I made it happen. I’ve been hard at work since I got my free STM32F0-Discovery board in the mail. Most recently I put together a starting template for building STM32F05x project on Linux. You’ll still need to install your own tool chain (I’m using the Code Sourcery G++: [...]

Tags:  stm template building discovery-project sourcery tool-chain microcontrollers  

Of course putting a microcontroller into sleep mode or changing the clock rate has an effect on the power consumption of the chip, but what about different bits of code? Is multiplying two numbers more efficient than adding them, and does ORing two values consume more power than NOPping? [jcw] wanted to compare the power [...]

Tags:  code power effect clock-rate power-consumption sleep-mode microcontrollers  

MyHDL is a Python module that brings FPGA programming into the Python environment. [Christopher Felton] tipped us off about a simple tutorial he just finished that gives an overview of how the module is used. You may remember hearing about PyCPU a couple days ago which can run very simple Python code on a FPGA. There [...]

Tags:  python-module python-programming python-code microcontrollers  

So here’s the scenario. You’re the boss and everyone needs to kiss up to you speak with you about important project details. You need a receptionist, or a creative employee who will build a calendar display the lets people check if you’re free to chat. It works by querying a Microsoft Exchange server for the guy’s calendar. [...]

Tags:  calendar bossy scenario microsoft-exchange-server creative-employee project-details microcontrollers  

Last Wednesday I posted a video review of the new STM32F0-Discovery board which is built around an ARM Cortex-M0 chip. I speculated that it should work with the open source project aimed at programming these discovery boards. I tested it out and a connection could be made, but no code could be flashed. So I [...]

Tags:  open-source-project video-review cortex microcontrollers  

[Emanuele] is using Google Docs to log his temperature sensor data automatically (translated). We can see a few benefits gained by using this system. One is that you don’t have to visit the site of the logging hardware to harvest the data, another is that Google will automatically graph the data for you. Of course this [...]

Tags:  docs google data sensor-data temperature-sensor emanuele microcontrollers  

[Suraj] has been working with some larger MSP430 chips with won’t fit on the Launchpad board. But that’s okay because he built a shield and wrote a guide about using the Spy-Bi-Wire protocol for programming the chips. SBW is a four-wire interface. In the past we’ve used all of the board’s programming connections for in circuit [...]

Tags:  wire-protocol wire-interface s-programming microcontrollers  

While [Vinod] says he’s not an expert in this sort of thing, we really like his audio spectrum analyzer build from a simple microcontroller and LCD display. It is a well-studied fact that every audio waveform – a recording of your voice, for instance – is just the sum of many, many sine waves. These sine [...]

Tags:  analyzer spectrum microcontroller vinod audio-spectrum-analyzer audio-waveform sine-waves microcontrollers  

There are few things more frustrating than being in the middle of working on a project and realizing that you are missing some crucial component that ties the whole thing together. According to Murphy’s Law, this sort of thing will only happen when parts are completely impossible to procure. If you’re ever hunting for a [...]

Tags:  thing touch pencil pencil-and-paper sensors microcontrollers  

If you’d like to start experimenting in DSP, or just want to build a guitar pedal, here’s the project for you. It’s an audio echo using just a microcontroller from the fruitful workshop of [Vinod]. For his circuit, [Vinod] fed the output of a small electret microphone into a small amplifier, and then into the [...]

Tags:  delay dsp microcontroller vinod electret-microphone guitar-pedal digital-delay microcontrollers  

You can find all kinds of LCD screens in broken electronics. But it’s often a chore to figure out how they are controlled if you don’t have a working device that can be used to sniff the communications protocol. [Justin] grabbed this character LCD screen from an old Brother printer and decided to see if [...]

Tags:  lcd salvaged screen justin communications-protocol lcd-screens character-lcd microcontrollers  

We’re used to [Sprite_TM] rolling out his own hacks hot on the heels of new concepts. Now we’re glad to see that [Jeff Ledger] is doing the same thing here. He was inspired by a Kickstarter project which vows to let you use fruit, clay, and a number of other common (but weird for this [...]

Tags:  sprite bananaphone fruit jeff-ledger hot-on-the-heels hacks microcontrollers  

Here’s two builds that print text to a TV with only two pins: Still Alive with an Arduino After seeing all the builds that play Still Alive, [Bob] decided to take a 1972 amber monitor and recreate the cut scene at the end of Portal. The build uses the TVout library for Arduino. There were a few problems [...]

Tags:  arduino microcontroller pins microcontrollers  

[Sulaiman Habsi] and two classmates put together a Morse Code interpreter as a class project at Sultan Qaboos University. The system listens to a morse code signal using a microphone, then translates that input to text which is displayed on this character LCD. The breadboarded circuit feeds an audio signal from the microphone, through an OpAmp, [...]

Tags:  signal interpreter microphone morse-code sultan-qaboos-university morse-code-signal classmates microcontrollers  

[Shane Burrell] decided to spend some time learning how the keypad on the his Kenwood TM-710A APRS radio mic works. It uses a different technique than you might think. Normally a grid of buttons is scanned as a matrix to detect keypresses, but this hardware actually counts pulses on a serial wire to take each [...]

Tags:  aprs keypad wire shane-burrell aprs-radio radio-mic keypresses microcontrollers  

[Andy Brown] wanted one level converter to rule them all, so he set out to build his own which included plenty of options. The chip at the top and center is a pretty neat little device. It’s an NXP 74ALVC164245DL. In addition to having an incredibly long and seemingly meaningless part number, it contains a pair of [...]

Tags:  level plenty conversion andy-brown level-converter microcontrollers  

The folks over at Gadget Gangster have been working on a music visualization system using a Parallax Propeller. The visualizations are awesome in their early-90s demoscene way, and of course we love anything using the oft under-appreciated Propeller. The project is called Video Beats and it generates music visualizations in the style of a blocky but very [...]

Tags:  propeller music visualization music-visualizations music-visualization visualization-system microcontrollers  

This project from a few years back is an interesting take on a metal detector. Instead of building a detection circuit, [Bruno Gavand] replaced the external clock crystal with an inductor. Here you can see the inductor coil next to the PIC 12F683. You can see two components jumping from one breadboard to the other. [...]

Tags:  clock-crystal external-clock inductor microcontrollers  

[Michael Ossman] wrote in to show off his newest project. He calls it the Firefly cap, which we think is something of a play on words. You can see that it serves as the cap of a Mason jar, but it also uses a supercap instead of a rechargeable battery. Posts about firelfly jars go [...]

Tags:  mason-jar supercap ossman microcontrollers  

If you have an idea for a fairly simple USB device but don’t want to invest in the more expensive microcontrollers, this library will be of interest to you. It’s a software implementation of the low-speed USB protocol for PIC 16F628. You can pick these up for around $2, and it just takes a few [...]

Tags:  pic-16f628 software-implementation speed-usb microcontrollers  

[Ben Peoples] works in theatrical electronics. Sounds like fun, and here’s an example of the kind of stuff he does. We’re not sure what event this installation was used for, but if the elevator ride needed something flashy just think of what the party room must have looked like. These HDTV screens on the ceiling [...]

Tags:  sounds-like-fun elevator hdtv microcontrollers  

[Minifloat] is using his TI Launchpad development board as an In-System Programmer for AVR chips (translated). There are a ton of homebrew AVR programmers out there, and using an Arduino for ISP is quite popular. But recently we searched for a way to use the Launchpad as a programmer and didn’t find one. We’d venture [...]

Tags:  launchpad programmer avr avr-programmers isp-programmer system-programmer microcontrollers  

klBASIC is a BASIC interpreter written in C for AVR microcontrollers. [Karl Lunt] developed the project based on an assembly language BASIC interpreter for 68HC11 chips written by [Gordon Doughman]. The transition from assembly to C bulked up the code, so you’ll need a beefy AVR chip in order to store all of it. The [...]

Tags:  gordon-doughman karl-lunt avr-microcontrollers microcontrollers  

A while back, [DragonMinded] picked up a bunch of old arcade and pinball parts from a guy on Craigslist. These parts sat around for a while until a really neat plasma dot matrix display was found in the corner of a box in his garage. Doing the only reasonable thing, [DragonMinded] figured out how to [...]

Tags:  display matrix plasma dot-matrix-display reverse-engineering pinball microcontrollers  

It seems [Charles Moyes] and [Mengxiang Jiang] won’t suffer from the sore wrists and thumbs from an Atari controller any longer. They built a version of Pong played by concentrating and relaxing while wearing an EEG headset. Right now, there’s only enough hardware for one player; when the player operating the red paddle concentrates the paddle [...]

Tags:  paddle player pong charles-moyes sore-wrists moyes eeg microcontrollers  

[Kyle] and an a few of his classmates are wrapping up a microcontroller interfacing class at Purdue and thought it best to send in the results of their efforts. It’s a version of Super Smash Bros. made by just bitbanging pins on a microcontroller. The hardware for the project is based around a Freescale 9S12c32, an updated [...]

Tags:  microcontroller smash-bros freescale microcontrollers  

[Johan's] been working on a chunk of code for about seven years and he thinks it’s ready to help you with your next project. He calls it D1 (The One) and it lets you receive asynchronous data without the need for a hardware USART. It’s capable of working with signals from an IR or RF [...]

Tags:  asynchronous-data chunk johan microcontrollers  

[Shane] is building a new house and wants some, “subtle home automation” as he calls it. His first project is hooking up a small heater to the Internet, and judging from his demo video everything is going swimmingly. [Shane]‘s project is built around an mbed microcontroller that connects to the Internet via an Ethernet connection. The mbed [...]

Tags:  household-devices home-automation google microcontrollers  

[doragasu]‘s wife is always misplacing her keys. To solve this problem, [doragasu] created a small Bluetooth-enabled key fob that is able to remotely sound an alarm when commanded to by a cell phone. The case and LiPo battery of [doragasu]‘s project comes from a small photo frame key fob. The LCD display and PCB of [...]

Tags:  doragasu bluetooth fob photo-frame lcd-display project-comes-from microcontrollers  

[Sebastian] is learning Morse code and CW radio, and of course he needed a telegraph key. Instead of using the terribly unergonomic paddle style key, he built a capacitive touch iambic key over the course of a few evenings. An iambic key usually has two switches. When one switch is closed, it will transmit a [...]

Tags:  telegraph touch course sebastian morse cw-radio telegraph-key paddle-style microcontrollers  

[Dustin Andrews] built this add-on board which works as a proximity sensor. He wanted a standalone sensor for his Arduino projects which would use a single pin as a trigger. This lets him alert the Arduino when an object approaches the sensor without the need for polling or extra code on the Arduino side of [...]

Tags:  arduino proximity sensor dustin-andrews proximity-sensor microcontrollers  

We’re going to have to take [Mike's] word for it that he built Conway’s Game of Life with high-definition video output. That’s because this screenshot is his only proof and it looks a bit fuzzy to us. But we are interested in the project which used an FPGA to generate a 1080p VGA output of [...]

Tags:  life game conway mike game-of-life vga-output video-output microcontrollers  

Don’t mind me, I’m just listening to some tunes during our poker game. Well, that and getting some electronic coaching about poker odds. This board lets you wiggle your toes to input the upcards, and those in your hand. After each entry the gadget will tell you your odds of winning the hand. Take it [...]

Tags:  board poker hand don poker-odds poker-game gadget microcontrollers  

[Vinod] has done a lot of work with microcontrollers, but this is his first try at displaying graphics using composite video. He had a small PAL television on hand, and an ATmega32 which just needs a stable clock source and a few resistors to get things going. There are a lot of other hacks around [...]

Tags:  lot experimenting bit vinod pal clock-source atmega32 displaying-graphics microcontrollers  

[Quinn Dunki] just reported in on the latest iteration in her computer project which is called Veronica. This time she added RAM to increase the VGA performance of her build. Like just about every other part of the project, [Quinn] knew what she wanted to do, but had to overcome a lot of issues along [...]

Tags:  quinn vram project veronica quinn-dunki boot-logo computer-project microcontrollers  

[Bob Alexander's] most recent project is a hack saw resizable ARM breakout board. He wanted to start using more ARM microcontrollers in his projects and went for a breadboard friendly design. It uses a 40-pin dip package, but if you need the horsepower but not the I/O you can literally cut it down to size. [...]

Tags:  board ARM resizable bob-alexander pin-dip-package microcontrollers microcontrollers  

[Chris] put together a bunch of common components to create this wireless pan and tilt system for a security camera or a robot. The motorized base is simple enough, using two servos to make up a mount for the digital camera. In this case he used a parts package which is designed to mount the servos [...]

Tags:  bunch Wireless camera chris tilt-system wireless-pan servos microcontrollers  

Building a capacitance meter is a great exercise. If you’re feeling quite safe in your digital-circuit-only life, this will push just far enough out of the comfort zone for you to see there’s nothing to fear in adding analog circuits to your designs. Here, [Raj] compares a voltage divider and RC timer to calculate the value of [...]

Tags:  capacitance understanding meter capacitance-meter voltage-divider analog-circuits microcontrollers  

The biggest benefit to using the BeagleBone is it’s 700 MHz ARM processor. If you’re just messing around with basic I/O that power is going unused, but [Nuno Alves] is taking advantage of its power. He built a PDF password cracker based on the $85 development board. We recently saw how easy it is to [...]

Tags:  beaglebone password pdf pdf-password-cracker arm-processor s-700 microcontrollers  

[vinod] wanted to familiarize himself with AVR assembly programming, but wanted to do something a little more ambitious than simply blinking an LED. While the completed build does blink a few LEDs, we love that e decided to implement multitasking on his microcontroller. The program [vinod] came up with uses round robin scheduling to give one of [...]

Tags:  vinod assembly avr assembly-programming multitasking microcontrollers  

[Joby Taffey] just rolled out a serial bootloader for the Chipcon CC1110/CC1111 processors. The project is called CCTL and aims to make prototyping with the Girltech IM-ME a bit less tedious. Up until now firmware for the device had to be pushed in with a GoodFET or TI proprietary programmer which was quite slow. But this [...]

Tags:  serial bootloader chipcon girltech joby microcontrollers  

[Radu Motisan] wrote in to share a cool project he has been working on lately, a pulsed microspot welder/cutter. The device is capable of spot welding thin metals such as foils and battery tabs by sending a pair of high current pulses between the two electrodes whenever [Radu] presses the trigger button. The cutting portion [...]

Tags:  welder radu cutter thin-metals current-pulses capacitive-discharge microcontrollers  

Here is [Voelker] showing off his FPGA-based camera hardware. He picked up an ov7670 camera on eBay for about $10 and set to work pulling pixels and processing the images. He’s now able to grab thirty frames per second and push them to his own Java display application. He’s using the Papilio board and if you [...]

Tags:  fpga camera module camera-hardware camera-module ebay microcontrollers  

Armed with four wingtip-mounted Sienar Fleet Systems L-s9.3 laser cannons and a SFS P-s5.6 twin ion engine, the TIE Interceptor has become the scourge of the Rebel fleet, nearly capable of out-running and out-maneuvering the beloved A-wings of Nomad Squadron. Because of [Matt]‘s tireless work, we can now visualize TIE Interceptors on approach with our targeting computers [...]

Tags:  fleet tie oscilloscope d-graphics matt tie-interceptor laser-cannons fleet-systems microcontrollers  

[Vinod Stanur] just finished another hobby project by building a WAV audio player using a microcontroller. He had started development a while back using a PIC microcontroller. But the chip he was using didn’t have enough SRAM to allocate as a playback buffer. When he got his hands on an ATmega32 his mind turned back [...]

Tags:  pic-microcontroller atmega32 hobby-project microcontrollers  

While his wife was out-of-town [James] jumped at the opportunity to do some snooping around with her Chevy Tahoe’s parking assist sensors. We can understand how pulling parts out of someone’s car would make them none too happy. But we find it hilarious that it’s a leased company car he’s tinkering around with. But we’re [...]

Tags:  wife parking car james chevy-tahoe company-car sensors microcontrollers