An Exceptional BASIC Computer

April 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

BASIC

Since [Dan] has started using microcontrollers, he’s been absolutely fascinated by the fact these chips are essentially low performance computers. Once he caught wind of TinyBASIC, he decided he would have a go at creating a simple, tiny computer that’s very simple to the old, tiny, 8-bit computers of yore.

The computer is built on an Arduino shield, using TinyBASIC, the TVout library, and the PS/2 keyboard library. After piecing together a little bit of code, the Arduino IDE alerted [Dan] to the fact the TVout and PS/2 libraries were incompatible with each other. This inspired [Dan] to use the ATMega328P as a coprocessor running the TVout library, and using the capacious ATMega1284P as the home of TinyBASIC and the PS/2 library.

A circuit was put together in Fritzing using minimal components, and a PCB milled out of copper board. After the board was tinned, [Dan] had a beautiful minimalist retro computer with nearly 14kB of RAM free and an RCA display.

Future versions of the build will probably be based around the Arduino Mega, allowing for a TV resolution of 720×480. Also on tap are an SD card slot, LEDs, pots, and possibly even headers for I2C and SPI.

Resetting DRM On 3D Printer Filament

April 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 94 Comments

The Da Vinci 3D printer is, without a doubt, the future of printing plastic objects at home. It’s small, looks good on a desk, is fairly cheap, and most importantly for printer manufacturers, uses chipped filament cartridges that can’t be refilled.

[Oliver] over at Voltivo was trying to test their new printer filament with a Da Vinci and ran head-on into this problem of chipped filament. Digging around inside the filament cartridge, he found a measly 300 grams of filament and a small PCB with a Microchip 11LC010 EEPROM. This one kilobyte EEPROM contains all the data about what’s in the filament cartridge, including the length of filament remaining.

After dumping the EEPROM with an Arduino and looking at the hex file, [Oliver] discovered the amount of filament remaining was held in a single two-byte value. Resetting this value to 0xFFFF restores the filament counter to its virgin state, allowing him to refill the filament. A good thing, too; the cartridge filament is about twice as expensive as what we would normally buy.