Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

DIYing A Raspberry Pi Power Bank

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Over the last decade or so, battery technology has improved massively. While those lithium cells have enabled thin, powerful smartphones and quadcopters, [patrick] thought it would be a good idea to do something a little simpler. He built a USB power bank with an 18650 cell. While it would be easier to simply buy a USB power bank, that’s not really the point, is it?

This project is the follow-up to one of [patrick]’s earlier projects, a battery backup for the Raspberry Pi. This earlier project used an 14500 cell and an MSP430 microcontroller to shut the Pi down gracefully …read more

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Giving The World A Better SID

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Here’s a business plan for you, should you ever run into an old silicon fab sitting in a dumpster: build Commodore SID chips. The MOS 6581 and 8580 are synthesizers on a chip, famously used in the demoscene, and even today command prices of up to $40 USD per chip. There’s a market for this, and with the right process, this could conceivably be a viable business plan.

Finding a silicon fab in a dumpster is a longshot, but here’s the next best thing: an FPGASID project. The FPGASID is a project to re-create the now-unobtanium MOS 6581 found in …read more

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mRISC-V, The First Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller

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Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product of the Open Source software movement is perhaps more important than Gutenberg’s press. But hardware has not yet fully embraced this super-charging effect of openness. Being able to simply buy an open source CPU, free of all proprietary bits and NDAs is impossible.

Now, this is finally changing. OnChip, a startup from a group of doctoral students at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia, have been working …read more

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The Future Travels Of The Travelling Hackerbox

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For the past year, I’ve been organizing a very special project over on hackaday.io. It’s the Travelling Hacker Box, a box full of random electronics junk, sibling to the The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk, and a project that has already traveled more than 25,000 miles. Earlier this month, I said the Hackerbox is going international, I asked for contributors to receive the project in faraway lands, and now it’s time for the final report. This is where the Travelling Hackerbox will be going over the next year.

More than 200 people responded to the call for hackerbox …read more

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The Future Travels Of The Travelling Hackerbox

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For the past year, I’ve been organizing a very special project over on hackaday.io. It’s the Travelling Hacker Box, a box full of random electronics junk, sibling to the The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk, and a project that has already traveled more than 25,000 miles. Earlier this month, I said the Hackerbox is going international, I asked for contributors to receive the project in faraway lands, and now it’s time for the final report. This is where the Travelling Hackerbox will be going over the next year.

More than 200 people responded to the call for hackerbox …read more

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Commodore Home – Your Smart Home For 1983

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The Internet of Things is a horrific waste of time, even though no one knows exactly what it is. What would make it better? Classic Commodore gear, of course. Now you can run your smart home with a Commodore 64 and Commodore Home, the newest smart home framework from [retro.moe].

Commodore Home comes with the standard smart home features you would expect. The home lighting solution is a dot matrix printer, a few gears, and string tied to the light switch. Activate the printer, and the lights turn on and off. Brilliant. Multiple light switches can be controlled by daisy …read more

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Hackaday Links: November 20, 2016

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The Raspberry Pi 2 is getting an upgrade. No, this news isn’t as big as you would imagine. The Raspberry Pi 2 is powered by the BCM2836 SoC, an ARM Cortex-A7 that has served us well over the years. The ‘2836 is going out of production, and now the Raspberry Pi foundation is making the Pi 2 with the chip found in the Raspberry Pi 3, the BCM2837. Effectively, the Pi 2 is now a wireless-less (?) version of the Pi 3. It still costs $35, the same as the Pi 3, making it a rather dumb purchase for the …read more

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Bringing USB Devices To The Apple Desktop Bus

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During the development of the greatest member of the Apple II family, the Apple IIgs, someone suggested to [Woz] that a sort of universal serial bus was needed for keyboards, mice, trackballs, and other desktop peripherals. [Woz] disappeared for a time and came back with something wonderful: a protocol that could be daisy-chained from keyboard to a graphics tablet to a mouse. This protocol was easily implemented on a cheap microcontroller, provided 500mA to the entire bus, and was used for everything from license dongles to modems.

The Apple Desktop Bus, or ADB, was a decade ahead of its time, …read more

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Building A LoRa PHY With SDR

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The Internet of Things is terrible when it’s your toaster. The real fun happens when you have hundreds or thousands of sensors sending data back to a base station every day. That requires low power, and that means LPWAN, the Low Power Wide Area Network.

There are a lot of options for LPWAN, but few are a perfect fit. LoRa is one of the rare exceptions, offering years of operation on a single AA cell, and range measured in miles. Layers two and three of LoRa are available as public documentation, but until now layer one has been patented and …read more

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3D Printering: Smartphone Resin Printers Actually Work

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Last spring, the world saw something amazing. It was a device that would revolutionize the planet, save the world, and turn your smartphone into a 3D printer. Kickstarters aren’t known for selling themselves short. I speak, of course, of the OLO 3D printer, later renamed the ONO 3D printer, ostensibly because of a trademark dispute.

While filament-based 3D printers are extremely capable and slicing software is only getting better, resin-based printers are able to produce prints of nearly unparalleled quality. If you want high-resolution objects and fine detail, a resin printer is the way to go. These resin printers, however, …read more

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