How a Microcontroller Hiding in a USB Port Became an FPGA Hiding in the Same

When you think of microcontroller development, you probably picture either a breadboard with a chip or a USB-connected circuit board. But Tim Ansell pictured an ARM dev board that is almost completely hidden inside of a USB port. His talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference tells that story and then some. Check out the newly published video, along with more details of the talk, after the break.

Tim is the creator of Tomu, the tiny ARM Cortex M0+ board that we first covered back in January. The board has a Silicon Labs EMF32 on one side, four traces to interface …read more

Continue reading How a Microcontroller Hiding in a USB Port Became an FPGA Hiding in the Same

Tomu: A Microcontroller for Your USB Port

Looking for a ultra tiny development board? Tomu is an ARM Cortex M0+ device that fits inside your USB port. We’ve seen these in person, and they’re tiny.

There’s a few commercial devices in this form factor on the market. For example, the Yubikey Nano emulates a keyboard to provide codes for two-factor authentication. The Yubikey’s tiny hardware does this job well, but the closed-source device isn’t something you can modify.

Tomu is a new device for your USB port. It sports a Silicon Labs EFM32 microcontroller, two buttons, and two LEDs. This particular microcontroller is well suited to …read more

Continue reading Tomu: A Microcontroller for Your USB Port