The completed oscilloscope in parts, with the screen in the front connected with prototyping wires, protoboarded buttons on the right, and the BlackPill board somewhere behind

DIY STM32 Scope Is Simple, Cheap, And Featureful

February 27, 2023 by Arya Voronova 27 Comments

Would you like to have a small digital oscilloscope? Do you have a spare BlackPill (STM32F401) board and a TFT display laying around? [tvvlad1234] presents us with a simple and educational digital storage oscilloscope design that barely needs any components for you to build one, and it’s packed with features just like you would expect from a self-respecting open-source project. Not just that — it can even stream data to your computer, in a format compatible with the TekScope software!

It’s hard to overshadow just how easy this scope is to build, use, and hack on. You really don’t need much in the way of parts, a protoboard will do, though you can also etch or order your own PCBs. The front-end is super straightforward to find components for and assemble, a few opamps and resistors is all you need. So after jumper-wiring the LCD and three push buttons to your BlackPill, you’re golden.

Of course, the simple frontend results in the input range being from -3.3 V to 3.3 V, but as you could guess, this is exactly the kind of project where you could tweak the resistors and even upgrade it later on. Are you a bit lost in how oscilloscopes work? [tvvlad1234] has an explainer for you, too!

This build could easily take up a honorary “temporary turned permanent” place on your bench, thanks to its McGyver-esque qualities. It’s also, quite possibly, a better scope than the red “soldering kit” ones we’ve seen online. All in all, it’s a strong contender in the “simple and powerful DIY scope” arena, before this, we’ve seen one built with an Arduino Nano, and one with a Pi Pico.

Laptop Motherboard? No, X86 Single-Board Computer!

February 27, 2023 by Arya Voronova 47 Comments

Sometimes a Raspberry Pi will not cut it – especially nowadays, when the prices are high and the in-stock amounts are low. But if you look in your closet, you might find a decently-specced laptop with a broken screen or faulty hinges. Or perhaps someone you know is looking to get rid of a decent laptop with a shattered case. Electronics recycling or eBay, chances are you can score a laptop with at least some life left in it.

Let’s hack! I’d like to show you how a used laptop motherboard could be the heart of your project, and walk you through some specifics you will want to know.

And what a great deal it could be for your next project! Laptop motherboards can help bring a wide variety of your Linux- and Windows-powered projects to life, in a way that even NUCs and specialized SBCs often can’t do. They’re way cheaper, way more diverse, and basically omnipresent. The CPU can pack a punch, and as a rule PCIe, USB3, and SATA ports are easily accessible with no nonsense like USB-throttled Ethernet ports.

Continue reading “Laptop Motherboard? No, X86 Single-Board Computer!” →

The sensor hub in all its glory, sensor itself on top, standing on 3D-printed feet, and the PCB on the bottom

Hacker-Friendly And Elegant Air Quality Sensor Hub

February 27, 2023 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

Ever wanted an indoor environment sensor that’s dead simple yet a complete package? That’s the anotter-sensor-hub project from [Jana Marie], designed for the Sensirion SEN05x series sensors, with a SEN055 sensor shown in the picture above. Given such a sensor, you can measure VOCs and NOCs (Volatile and Non-Volatile Organic Compounds), as well as PM1, PM2.5, PM4 and PM10 particulate matter indices, with temperature and humidity sensing thrown in for good measure. Fully open and coupled with 3D printable stand files, this alone makes for an air quality hub fit for a hacker’s desk. That’s not all, however — this board’s elegant extensibility is a good match for the sensor’s impressive capabilities!

The PCB itself might look simple, it’s simply an ESP32 and some supporting circuitry required. But you’ll notice there’s also a trove of connector footprints for different interfaces; whatever else you might want to add to your sensor hub, whether it connects through I2C, SPI or PWM, you can! As usual, the sensor itself is the most expensive part of such a project — the boards themselves are around $5 USD apiece fully assembled, but one sensor-included hub will set you back roughly $42 USD. That said, it’s a great value for the price, and the trove of sensing data you can get might just more than pay for itself in quality-of-life improvements you make. Of course, everything is open-source and comes as a complete packages for you to start using. The firmware, KiCad files, 3D holder and even Grafana dashboard files can be found on GitHub.

Such air quality sensor platforms have been getting more and more popular, and hackers have been paying attention. Having a full open-source package like this at our disposal is amazing. If you’re looking for a cheaper “baby’s first air quality sensor”, drop by your local IKEA — there’s a way less featureful but quite cheap sensor that you can equip with an ESP8266, perhaps, even on a custom PCB.

All About USB-C: Replying Low-Level PD

February 22, 2023 by Arya Voronova 31 Comments

Last time, we configured the FUSB302 to receive USB PD messages, and successfully received a “capability advertisement” message from a USB-C PSU. Now we crack the PD specification open, parse the message, and then craft a reply that makes the PSU give us the highest voltage available.

How did the buffer contents look, again?

>>> b
b'\xe0\xa1a,\x91\x01\x08,\xd1\x02\x00\x13\xc1\x03\x00\xdc\xb0\x04\x00\xa5@\x06\x00<!\xdc\xc0H\xc6\xe7\xc6\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'

The zeroes at the end might look non-significant, and they indeed are not with 99.99% certainty – that said, don’t just discard the entire tail end; one of the bytes in the beginning encodes the length of the message. We’ll read those bytes first, and then read only exactly as much as we need, making sure we aren’t reading two messages and interpreting it as one, and that we’re not discarding zeroes that are part of the message.

Today, we will write code that parses messages right after reading them from the FIFO buffer – however, keep this message handy for reference, still; and if you don’t have the hardware, you can use it to try your hand at decoding nevertheless. If you wanna jump in, you can find today’s full code here!

Continue reading “All About USB-C: Replying Low-Level PD” →

All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD

February 14, 2023 by Arya Voronova 26 Comments

In this USB-C series, we’ve covered quite a bit of USB-C – things that are well known, things that should be better known, and a couple things that just appeared online for the first time. We’ve covered almost everything in some depth except USB Power Delivery. I’ve described the process a bit in the “Power” article, but that was mostly about how to use PD by simply buying the right solution. However, that’s not enough for a hacker. Let’s see if we can make our own PD trigger board. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD” →

Screenshot of KiCad 7 feature that lets you overlay a PCB bitmap image and draw traces over it, being used for board reverse-engineering purposes

KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements

February 13, 2023 by Arya Voronova 109 Comments

Yesterday, the KiCad team has released KiCad 7.0.0 – a surprise for those of us who have only gotten used to the wonders of KiCad 6, and it’s undoubtedly a welcome one! Some of these features, you might’ve seen mentioned in the KiCad 2022 end-of-year recap, and now, we get to play with them in a more stable configuration. There’s a trove of features and fixes for all levels of KiCad users, beginners, hobbyists and professionals alike – let’s start with some that everyone can appreciate! Continue reading “KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements” →

High-contrast pictures described on the article, put onto a wall beside a crib

High-Contrast Images For Hacker Family Harmonics

February 13, 2023 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

There’s a new addition to the Adafruit family, and it’s not a microcontroller board as you’d expect – however, we will still find plenty to learn from. On the Adafruit blog, [Phillip Torrone] shares a set of high-contrast images with us; the idea for such images is that they’re more appealing for a child during the first few months of its life, and not just that – they can support a kid’s development, too. The idea behind high-contrast images is twofold. During the first few months of life, a baby’s visual systems are only taking shape, and are nowhere near being advanced – so, sources of easily discernible and varied visual input can help it develop, as well as, perhaps, aid in holding attention.

The second part is – they look nice in their own way, and one would hope that a baby can appreciate them in the same way parents do. The images are quite varied, with some being somewhat electronics-themed (including an Adafruit logo, of course) and many being fairly neutral, which has to be an upside for us hackers when it comes to the spouse acceptance factor. For any of us interested, there are downloadable PDFs and

In a way, these are just like AprilTags – aiming to be helpful in development of visual algorithms. With such a family, we can’t wait to see what comes next – computer engineering books? Baby monitors with machine learning? Sleep-data-driven knit blankets? No matter what’s in store for us, we hope that for the Adafruit family, this journey will be smooth sailing.