Collaborate Disseminate
Most of us are familiar with the Arduino Uno, a starting place for electronics projects since 2010. But what if the Arduino Uno was released in 1980? You’d probably get …read more Continue reading Give Your Projects A Retro Tint With This 8051-based Arduino Uno
Just like the clock clock of old, there’s something magical about a giant wall of smaller pieces working together to make a larger version of that thing. The E-Paper Wall …read more Continue reading E-Paper Wall Paper
With soldering irons being so incredibly useful, and coming on the heels of the success of a range of portable, all-in-one soldering irons from the likes of Waveshare and Pine64, …read more Continue reading Hacking a €15 8051-Based Portable Soldering Iron With Custom Firmware
Nobody likes opening up a hacking target and finding a black epoxy blob inside, but all hope is not lost. At least not if you’ve got the dedication and skills …read more Continue reading Remoticon 2021 // Jeroen Domburg [Sprite_tm] Hacks the Buddah Flower
The first optical mice had to be used on a specially printed mousepad with a printed grid that the four-quadrant infrared sensor could detect. Later, mice swapped the infrared sensor …read more Continue reading Streaming Video From a Mouse
In the interest of simplification or abstraction, we like to think of the laptop on the kitchen table as a single discrete unit of processing. In fact, there is a …read more Continue reading Extracting the WiFi Firmware and Putting Back a Keylogger
Sometimes when a piece of electronics lands on the bench, you find that its chips have their markings sanded off. The manufacturer is trying to make the task of the reverse engineer less easy, thus protecting their market. [Maurizio Butti] found an unexpected one in an electronic switch designed for …read more
Continue reading Ground Off Part Number Leads To Chip Detective Work
The first sound card to output PCM audio — the kind you need for audio samples — wasn’t the Sound Blaster. The AdLib Music Synthesizer Card could output PCM audio over software. The AdLib card also cost $200 at the time of its release. This was too much for some, …read more
Collecting old CPUs and firing them up again is all the rage these days, but how do you know if they will work? For many of these ICs, which ceased production decades ago, sorting the good stuff from the defective and counterfeit is a minefield.
Testing old chips is a challenge in itself. Even if you can find the right motherboard, the slim chances of escaping the effect of time on the components (in particular, capacitor and EEPROM degradation) make a reliable test setup hard to come by.
Enter [Samuel], and the Universal Chip Analyzer (UCA). Using an FPGA to …read more
Continue reading Universal Chip Analyzer: Test Old CPUs In Seconds
[Ivan Franco] sent us this great synthesizer project that he’s working on. Or maybe it’s more like a synthesizer meta-project: a synthesizer construction set. You see, what Pryth has is a Raspberry Pi inside that’s running a custom distribution that includes SuperCollider to generate the sound, OSC for the communication layer, and a Teensy with up to 80 (!) multiplexed analog inputs that you’ll connect up to whatever hardware you desire.
With the computer inside the box — the Raspberry Pi in question — you can easily make this system into a standalone musical instrument, without tethering it to your …read more
Continue reading The Most Flexible Synthesizer is DIY, Raspberry Pi