Author: Al Williams

4467 Articles

Lock In Amplifiers

September 27, 2017 by 19 Comments

If you have about an hour to kill, you might want to check out [Shahriar’s] video about the Stanford Research SR530 lock in amplifier (see below). If you know what a lock in amplifier is, it is still a pretty interesting video and if you don’t know, then it really is a must see.

Most of the time, you think of an amplifier as just a circuit that makes a small signal bigger in some way — that is, increase the voltage or increase the current. But there are whole classes of amplifiers designed to reject noise and the lock in amplifier is one of them. [Shahriar’s] video discusses the math theory behind the amplifier, shows the guts, and demonstrates a few experiments (including measuring the speed of sound), as well.

Continue reading “Lock In Amplifiers” →

The Linux FPGA

September 26, 2017 by 15 Comments

It was never unusual to have a CPU and an FPGA together. After all, each has different strengths and weaknesses. However, newer devices like the Xilinx Zynq have both a CPU and an FPGA in the same package. That means your design has to span hardware, FPGA configurations, and software. [Mitchell Orsucci] was using a Zynq device on a ArtyZ7-20 board and decided he wanted to use Linux to operate the ARM processor and provide user-space tools to interface with the FPGA and reconfigure it dynamically.

This sounds like a big project and it certainly isn’t trivial by any means. However, the Xilinx tools do a lot of the heavy lifting, including setting up the Linux kernel and a suitable root file system. The bulk of [Mitchell’s] work was in developing user space tools for Linux programs to interact with the FPGA hardware. You can see a short video demo below.

Continue reading “The Linux FPGA” →

Emulate ICs In Python

September 26, 2017 by 16 Comments

Most people who want to simulate logic ICs will use Verilog, VHDL, or System Verilog. Not [hsoft]. He wanted to use Python, and wrote a simple Python framework for doing just that. You can find the code on GitHub, and there is an ASCII video that won’t embed here at Hackaday, but which you can view at ASCIInema.

Below the break we have an example of “constructing” a circuit in Python using ICemu:

Continue reading “Emulate ICs In Python” →

A Cold Hard Look At FPGAs

September 25, 2017 by 30 Comments

Researchers at the Delft University of Technology wanted to use FPGAs at cryogenic temperatures down around 4 degrees Kelvin. They knew from previous research that many FPGAs that use submicron fabrication technology actually work pretty well at those temperatures. It is the other components that misbehave — in particular, capacitors and voltage regulators. They worked out an interesting strategy to get around this problem.

The common solution is to move the power supply away from the FPGA and out of the cold environment. The problem is, that means long wires and fluctuating current demands will cause a variable voltage drop at the end of the long wire. The traditional answer to that problem is to have the remote regulator sense the voltage close to the load. This works because the current going through the sense wires is a small fraction of the load current and should be relatively constant. The Delft team took a different approach because they found sensing power supplies reacted too slowly: they created an FPGA design that draws nearly the same current no matter what it is doing.

Continue reading “A Cold Hard Look At FPGAs” →

DIY LiPo Protectors

September 25, 2017 by 24 Comments

Spiderman’s Uncle Ben was known to say, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The same holds true for battery power. [Andreas] wanted to use protected 18650 cells, but didn’t want to buy them off the shelf. He found a forty cent solution. Not only can you see it in the video, below, but he also explains and demonstrates what the circuit is doing and why.

Protection is important with LiPo technology. Sure, LiPo cells have changed the way we use portable electronics, but they can be dangerous. If you overcharge them or allow them to go completely dead and then charge them, they can catch fire. Because they have a low source resistance — something that is usually desirable — short-circuiting them can also create a fire hazard. We’ve covered the chemistry in depth, but to prevent all the badness you’ll want a charger circuit.

Continue reading “DIY LiPo Protectors” →

Reverse Engineering Guitar Hero

September 25, 2017 by 11 Comments

What do you do when a ten-year-old video game has a bug in it? If you are [ExileLord] you fix it, even if you don’t have the source code. Want to know how? Luckily, he produced a video showing all the details of how he tracked the bug down and fixed it. You can see the video below. You may or may not care about Guitar Hero, but the exercise of reverse engineering and patching the game is a great example of the tools and logic required to reverse engineer any binary software, especially a Windows binary.

The tool of choice is IDA, an interactive debugger and disassembler. The crash thows an exception and since [ExileLord] has done some work on the game before, he was able to find a function that was creating a screen element that eventually led to the crash.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering Guitar Hero” →

3D Printing Aluminum With Nanoparticles

September 25, 2017 by 20 Comments

We love our 3D printers. But sometimes we really wish we could print in metal. While metal printing is still out of reach for most of us, HRL Labs announced a powdered aluminum printing process that they claim is a breakthrough because it allows printing (and welding) of high-strength aluminum alloys that previously were unprintable and unweldable.

The key is treating the metal with special zirconium-based nanoparticles. The nanoparticles act as nucleation sites that allow the aluminum to form the correct microstructure. The full paper on the process appears in Nature.

Continue reading “3D Printing Aluminum With Nanoparticles” →