Author: John Elliot V

145 Articles

2WD robot

Two-Wheeled Arduino Robot Project For Beginners

December 20, 2025 by 30 Comments

Here’s a fun build from [RootSaid] that is suitable for people just getting started with microcontrollers and robotics — an Arduino-controlled two-wheeled robot.

The video assumes you already have one of the common robotics kits that includes the chassis, wheels, and motors, something like this. You’ll also need a microcontroller (in this case, an Arduino Nano), a L293D motor driver IC, a 9 V battery, and some jumper wires.

The video goes into detail about how the two wheels connected to one motor each can move the robot in various directions: forward, backward, left, and right. The motors can be made to spin either forward or backward, depending on the polarity of the power supply, using an H-bridge circuit.

The L293D motor driver IC powers and controls the motors connected to the wheels. The L293D takes its commands from the Arduino. The rest of the video is spent going over the software for controlling the wheels.

When you’re ready to go to the next level, you might enjoy this robot dog.

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Using GIMP for visual analysis

Decapsulating A PIC12F683 To Examine Its CMOS Implementation

December 19, 2025 by 8 Comments

In a recent video, [Andrew Zonenberg] takes us through the process of decapsulating a PIC12F683 to take a peek at its CMOS implementation.

This is a multipart series with five parts done and more to come. The PIC12F683 is an 8-pin flash-based, 8-bit microcontroller from Microchip. [Andrew] picked the PIC12F683 for decapsulation because back in 2011 it was the first microcontroller he broke read-protection on and he wanted to go back and revisit this chip, given particularly that his resources and skills had advanced in the intervening period.

The five videos are a tour de force. He begins by taking a package cross section, then decapsulating and delayering. He collects high-resolution photos as he goes along. In the process, he takes some time to explain the dangers of working with acid and the risk mitigations he has in place. Then he does what he calls a “floorplan analysis” which takes stock of the entire chip before taking a close look at the SRAM implementation.

If you’re interested in decapsulating integrated circuits you might want to take a look at Laser Fault Injection, Now With Optional Decapping, A Particularly Festive Chip Decapping, or even read through the transcript of the Decapping Components Hack Chat With John McMaster.

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Molecular beam epitaxy system Veeco Gen II at the FZU – Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The system is designed for growth of monocrystalline semiconductors, semiconducting heterostructures, materials for spintronics and other compound material systems containing Al, Ga, As, P, Mn, Cu, Si and C.

Germanium Semiconductor Made Superconductor By Gallium Doping

December 17, 2025 by 12 Comments

Over on ScienceDaily we learn that an international team of scientists have turned a common semiconductor germanium into a superconductor.

Researchers have been able to make the semiconductor germanium superconductive for the first time by incorporating gallium into its crystal lattice through the process of molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). MBE is the same process which is used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices such as diodes and MOSFETs and it involves carefully growing crystal lattice in layers atop a substrate.

When the germanium is doped with gallium the crystalline structure, though weakened, is preserved. This allows for the structure to become superconducting when its temperature is reduced to 3.5 Kelvin. Read all about it in the team’s paper here (PDF).

It is of course wonderful that our material science capabilities continue to advance, but the breakthrough we’re really looking forward to is room-temperature superconductors, and we’re not there yet. If you’re interested in progress in superconductors you might like to read about Floquet Majorana Fermions which we covered earlier this year.

A circuit diagram in a book on a desk with computers and microcontrollers

Taking Electronics To A Different Level

December 14, 2025 by 27 Comments

One part wants 3.3V logic. Another wants 5V. What do you do? Over on the [Playduino] YouTube channel, there’s a recent video running us through a not-so-recent concern: various approaches to level-shifting.

In the video, the specific voltage domains of 3.3 volts and 5 volts are given, but you can apply the same principles to other voltage domains, such as 1.8 volts, 2.5 volts, or nearly any two levels. Various approaches are discussed depending on whether you are interfacing 5 V to 3.3 V or 3.3 V to 5 V.

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A photo of tye blub glowing in the workshop

What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?

December 3, 2025 by 32 Comments

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it.

The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do such a thing? Well [Drake] said it was because he wanted to outdo [Photonicinduction] who had already put 20,000 watts through a light bulb. Nothing like a little friendly competition to drive… progress?

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[Piers] explains his code

A Deep Dive Into Using PIO And DMA On The RP2350

November 30, 2025 by 7 Comments

Here’s a fun rabbit hole to run down if you don’t already have the RP2040/RP2350 PIO feather in your cap: how to serve data without CPU intervention using PIO and DMA on the RP2350.

If you don’t know much about the RP2040 or RP2350 here’s the basic run down: the original Raspberry Pi Pico was released in 2021 with the RP2040 at its heart, with the RP2350 making its debut in 2024 with the Pico 2. Both microcontrollers include a feature known as Programmed I/O (PIO), which lets you configure tiny state machines and other facilities (shift registers, scratch registers, FIFO buffers, etc) to process simple I/O logic, freeing up the CPU to do other tasks.

The bottom line is that you can write very simple programs to do very fast and efficient I/O and these programs can run separately to the other code running on your micro. In the video below, [piers] explains how it works and how he’s used it in his One ROM project.

This is the latest installment from [piers rocks] whose One ROM project we’ve been tracking since July this year when we first heard about it. Since then we’ve been watching this project grow up and we were there when it was only implemented on the STM32F4, when it was renamed to One ROM, and when it got its USB stack. Along the way [piers rocks] was on FLOSS Weekly Episode 850: One ROM To Rule Them All too.

Have you seen PIO being put to good use in other projects? Let us know in the comments, or on the tips line!

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The box of the Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075

The Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 Digital Lab From The 1970s

November 26, 2025 by 6 Comments

In a recent video, [Jason Jacques] demos the Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 which was released in West Germany in the 1970s.

The Digital-Technik 2075 comes with a few components including a battery holder and 9 V battery, a push button, two 1 K resistors, a red LED, a 100 nF ceramic capacitor, a 100 µF electrolytic capacitor, a quad NAND gate IC, and a counter module which includes an IC and a 7-segment display. The kit also comes with wires, plugs, a breadboard, and a tool for extracting modules.

The Digital-Technik 2075 doesn’t use the spring terminals we see in other project labs of the time, such as the Science Fair kits from Radio Shack, and it doesn’t use modular Denshi blocks, such as we saw from the Gakken EX-150, but rather uses wire in conjunction with yellow plastic plugs. This seems to work well enough.

In the video, after showing us how to do switch debouncing, [Jason] runs us through making a counter with the digital components and then getting the counter to reset after it counts to five. This is done using NAND gates. Before he gets stuck into doing a project he takes a close look at the manual (which is in German) including some of the advertisements for other project labs from Busch which were available at the time. As he doesn’t speak German [Jason] prints out an English translation of the manual before working through it.

We’ve heard from [Jason] at Hackaday in recent history when we saw his Microtronic Phoenix Computer System which referenced the 2090 Microtronic Computer System which was also made by Busch.

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