Category Archives: COB

New Part Day: A fake Sun

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LED technology has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, with what was once considered unachievable being common place now. Two of the main parameters of interest, total input power and conversion efficiency have been steadily increasing over the years. An efficacy of 120 lumens/watt is fairly common nowadays, and it may not be improbable to expect double this figure in the near future. Input power ratings have also steadily increased, with single LED units capable of 100 W or more becoming common.

But the Chinese manufacturer Yuji seems to have hit the ball out of the park by …read more

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Blinking An LED – Extreme Edition

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This hacker’s video on blinking LEDs never got the recognition it deserves. At the time of writing clocking in at just 61 views, but it is indeed a work of art. Just trust me, scroll to the bottom of the article and watch it, you wont be disappointed.

Not convinced? OK, let me tell you about it and the world it has opened up in the Japanese maker scene. We’ve all blinked an LED. Maybe it was just to test a microcontroller, like the simplest Arduino example.

Or we’ve been a tad more old school and used the classic 555 …read more

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A Completely Open Microcontroller

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I don’t know about you, but the idea of an Arduino-class microprocessor board which uses completely open silicon is a pretty attractive prospect to us. That’s exactly [onchipUIS]’s stated goal. They’re part of a research group at the Universidad Industrial de Santander and have designed and taped out a RISCV implementation with Cortex M0-like characteristics.

The RISCV project has developed an open ISA (instruction set architecture) for modern 32-bit CPUs. More than 40 research groups and companies have now jumped on the project and are putting implementations together.

[onchipUIS] is one such project. And their twitter timeline shows the rapid …read more

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