Scratching That Itch

I did something silly. I bought a lot of ten “broken” cheesy indoor quadcopters on eBay — to hopefully cobble one working one together and to amuse my son. At this point, I’ve got eight working. The bad news is that they all come with dirt-cheap transmitters that aren’t really …read more

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Easy Portable Serial Ports

Modern operating systems insulate us — as programmers, especially — from so much work. Depending on how far back you go, programmers had to manage their own fonts, their own allocation space on mass storage, or even their own memory allotments. Every year, though, it seems like things get easier and easier. So why is it so annoying to open a simple serial port? It isn’t hard, of course, but on every operating system it seems to be painful — probably in an attempt to be flexible. And it is even worse if you want portability. I needed to write …read more

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What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?

Every once in a while, you get your hands on a cool piece of hardware, and of course, it’s your first instinct to open it up and see how it works, right? Maybe see if it can be coaxed into doing just a little bit more than it says on the box? And so it was last Wednesday, when I was at the Embedded World trade fair, and stumbled on a cool touch display floating apparently in mid-air.

The display itself was a sort of focused Pepper’s Ghost illusion, reflected off of an expensive mirror made by Aska3D. I don’t …read more

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Logic Analyzer Pushes the Limits of Miniaturization

Careful not to sneeze while using this diminutive logic analyzer — you could send it flying across the bench.

Undertaken more for the challenge than as a practical bench tool, [Uwe Hermann]’s tiny logic analyzer is an object lesson on getting a usable circuit as small as possible. Sure, some sacrifices had to be made; it’s only an eight-channel instrument without any kind of input protection at all, and lacks niceties like an EEPROM. But that allows it to fit on a mere 11 x 11-mm fleck of PCB. That’s a pretty impressive feat of miniaturization, given that the Cypress …read more

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Analyzing The 6502 With Python And Cheap Dev Boards

The Before Times were full of fancy logic analyzers. Connect the leads on these analyzers to a system, find that super special ROM cartridge, and you could look at the bus of a computer system in real time. We’ve come a long way since then. Now we have fast, cheap bits of hardware that can look at multiple inputs simultaneously, and there are Open Source solutions for displaying and interpreting the ones and zeros on a data bus. [hoglet] has built a very clever 6502 protocol decoder using Sigrok and a cheap 16-channel logic analyzer.

This protocol decoder is capable …read more

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Everything You Need To Know About Logic Probes

We just spent the last hour watching a video, embedded below, that is the most comprehensive treasure trove of information regarding a subject that we should all know more about — sniffing logic signals. Sure, it’s a long video, but [Joel] of [OpenTechLab] leaves no stone unturned.

At the center of the video is the open-source sigrok logic capture and analyzer. It’s great because it supports a wide variety of dirt cheap hardware platforms, including the Salae logic and its clones. Logic is where it shines, but it’ll even log data from certain scopes, multimeters, power supplies, and more. Not …read more

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