10 Cent Microcontroller Makes Tracker Music

October 29, 2025 by Tyler August 17 Comments

We are absurdly spoiled these days by our microcontrollers. Take the CH32V00X family– they’ve been immortalized by meme as “the ten cent micro” but with a clock speed of 48MHz and 32-bit registers to work with, they’re astoundingly capable machines even by the standards of home computers of yore. That’s what motivated [Tim] to see if he could use one to play MOD files, with only minimal extra parts– and quite specifically no DAC.

Well, that’s part of what motivated him. The other part was seeing Hackaday feature someone use a CH32V003 making chiptune-like beeps. [Tim] apparently saw that post as a gauntlet thrown down, and he picked it up with an even smaller chip: the CH32V002, which he proceeded to turn into a MOD player. For those of you who slept through 80s and early 90s (or for those precocious infants reading this who hadn’t then yet been born), MOD files are an electronic music format, pioneered on the Amiga home computers. Like MIDI, the file specifies when to play specific voices rather than encoding the sound directly. Unlike MIDI, MOD files are self-contained, with the samples/voices used being stored inside the file. The original version targeted four-channel sound, and that’s what [Tim] is using here.

As you can see from the demo video, it sounds great. He pulled it off by using the chip’s built-in PWM timer. Since the timer’s duty cycle is determined by a variable that can be changed by DMA, the CPU doesn’t end up with very much to do here. In the worst case, with everything in flash memory instead of SRAM, the CPU is only taxed at 24%, so there’s plenty of power to say, add graphics for a proper demo. Using the existing MODPlay Library, [Tim]’s player fits into 4kB of memory, leaving a perfectly-usable 12kB for the MOD file. As far as external components needed, it’s just an RC filter to get rid of PWM noise.

[Tim] has put his code up on GitHub for anyone interested, and has perhaps inadvertently cast down another gauntlet for anyone who wants to use these little RISC V microprocessors for musical tasks. If you can do better, please do, let us know.

Continue reading “10 Cent Microcontroller Makes Tracker Music” →

Supercon 2025 Badge Gets Vintage Star Trek Makeover

October 29, 2025 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

There are still a few days before the doors open on this year’s Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, but for the most dedicated attendees, the badge hacking has already begun…even if they don’t have a badge yet.

By referencing the design files we’ve published for this year’s Communicator badge, [Thomas Flummer] was able to produce this gorgeous 3D printed case that should be immediately recognizable to fans of the original Star Trek TV series.

Metal hinge pin? Brass inserts? Scotty would be proud.

Although the layout of this year’s badge is about as far from the slim outline of the iconic flip-up Trek communicator as you can get, [Thomas] managed to perfectly capture its overall style. By using the “Fuzzy Skin” setting in the slicer, he was even able to replicate the leather-like texture seen on the original prop.

Between that and the “chrome” trim, the finished product really nails everything Jadzia Dax loved about classic 23rd century designs. It’s not hard to imagine this could be some companion device to the original communicator that we just never got to see on screen.

While there’s no denying that the print quality on the antenna lid is exceptional, we’d really like to see that part replaced with an actual piece of brass mesh at some point. Luckily, [Thomas] has connected it to the body of the communicator with a removable metal hinge pin, so it should be easy enough to swap it out.

Considering the incredible panel of Star Trek artists that have been assembled for the Supercon 2025 keynote, we imagine this won’t be the last bit of Trek-themed hacking that we see this weekend — which is fine by us.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 853: Hardware Addiction; Don’t Send Help

October 29, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Cody Zuschlag about the Xen project! It’s the hypervisor that runs almost everywhere. Why is it showing up in IoT devices and automotive? And what’s coming next for the project? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 853: Hardware Addiction; Don’t Send Help” →

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: The Opto Flasher

October 29, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

There’s a part you’ll find in almost every mains powered switch mode power supply that might at first appear to have only one application. An optocoupler sits between the low voltage and the high voltage sides, providing a safely isolated feedback. Can it be used for anything else? [b.kainka] thinks so, and has proved it by making an optocoupler powered LED flasher.

If a part can be made to act as an amplifier with a gain greater than one, then it should also be possible to make it oscillate. We’re reminded of the old joke about it being very easy to make an oscillator except when you want to make one, but in this case when an optocoupler is wired up as an inverting amplifier with appropriate feedback, it will oscillate. In this case the rather large capacitor leading to a longish period, enough to flash an LED.

We like this circuit, combining as it does an unexpected use for a part, and a circuit in which the unusual choice might just be practical. It’s part of our 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, for which you just about still have time to make an entry yourself if you have one.

This Reactor Is On Fire! Literally…

October 29, 2025 by Al Williams 44 Comments

If I mention nuclear reactor accidents, you’d probably think of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, or maybe Chernobyl (or, now, Chornobyl). But there have been others that, for whatever reason, aren’t as well publicized. Did you know there is an International Nuclear Event Scale? Like the Richter scale, but for nuclear events. A zero on the scale is a little oopsie. A seven is like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the only two such events at that scale so far. Three Mile Island and the event you’ll read about in this post were both level five events. That other level five event? The Windscale fire incident in October of 1957.

If you imagine this might have something to do with the Cold War, you are correct. It all started back in the 1940s. The British decided they needed a nuclear bomb project and started their version of the Manhattan Project called “Tube Alloys.” But in 1943, they decided to merge the project with the American program.

The British, rightfully so, saw themselves as co-creators of the first two atomic bombs. However, in post-World War paranoia, the United States shut down all cooperation on atomic secrets with the 1946 McMahon Act.

We Are Not Amused

The British were not amused and knew that to secure a future seat at the world table, it would need to develop its own nuclear capability, so it resurrected Tube Alloys. If you want a detour about the history of Britan’s bomb program, the BBC has a video for you that you can see below.

Continue reading “This Reactor Is On Fire! Literally…” →

Restoring The E&L MMD-1 Mini-Micro Designer Single-Board Computer From 1977

October 29, 2025 by John Elliot V 9 Comments

Over on YouTube [CuriousMarc] and [TubeTimeUS] team up for a multi-part series E&L MMD-1 Mini-Micro Designer Restoration.

The E&L MMD-1 is a microcomputer trainer and breadboard for the Intel 8080. It’s the first ever single-board computer. What’s more, they mention in the video that E&L actually invented the breadboard with the middle trench for the ICs which is so familiar to us today; their US patent 228,136 was issued in August 1973.

The MMD-1 trainer has support circuits providing control logic, clock, bus drivers, voltage regulator, memory decoder, memory, I/O decoder, keyboard encoder, three 8-bit ports, an octal keyboard, and other support interconnects. They discuss in the video the Intel 1702 which is widely accepted as the first commercially available EPROM, dating back to 1971.

Continue reading “Restoring The E&L MMD-1 Mini-Micro Designer Single-Board Computer From 1977” →

Expert Systems: The Dawn Of AI

October 29, 2025 by Al Williams 18 Comments

We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predict exactly what it was going to do, we’d have thought you were crazy. Why not just get a person? But the dream of AI goes back to the earliest days of computers or even further, if you count Samuel Butler’s letter from 1863 musing on machines evolving into life, a theme he would revisit in the 1872 book Erewhon.

Of course, early real-life AI was nothing like you wanted. Eliza seemed pretty conversational, but you could quickly confuse the program. Hexapawn learned how to play an extremely simplified version of chess, but you could just as easily teach it to lose.

But the real AI work that looked promising was the field of expert systems. Unlike our current AI friends, expert systems were highly predictable. Of course, like any computer program, they could be wrong, but if they were, you could figure out why.

Experts?

As the name implies, expert systems drew from human experts. In theory, a specialized person known as a “knowledge engineer” would work with a human expert to distill his or her knowledge down to an essential form that the computer could handle.

This could range from the simple to the fiendishly complex, and if you think it was hard to do well, you aren’t wrong. Before getting into details, an example will help you follow how it works.

Continue reading “Expert Systems: The Dawn Of AI” →