Driving A DAC Real Fast With A Microcontroller

January 21, 2026 by 17 Comments

Normally, if you want to blast out samples to a DAC in a hurry, you’d rely on an FPGA, what with their penchant for doing things very quicky and in parallel. However, [Anabit] figured out a way to do the same thing with a microcontroller, thanks to the magic of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.

The design in question is referred to as the PiWave 150 MS/s Bipolar DAC, and as the name suggests, it’s capable of delivering a full 150 million samples per second with 10, 12, or 14 bits of resolution. Achieving that with a microcontroller would normally be pretty difficult. In regular linear operation, it’s hard to clock bits out to GPIO pins at that sort of speed. However, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 serves as a special case in this regard, thanks to its Programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem. It’s a state machine, able to be programmed to handle certain tasks entirely independently from the microcontroller’s main core itself, and can do simple parallel tasks very quickly. Since it can grab data from RAM and truck it out to a bank of GPIO pins in a single clock cycle, it’s perfect for trucking out data to a DAC in parallel at great speed. The Pi Pico 2’s clock rate tops out at 150 MHz, which delivers the impressive 150 MS/s sample rate.

The explainer video is a great primer on how this commodity microcontroller is set up to perform this feat in detail. If you’re trying for accuracy over speed, we’ve explored solutions for that as well. Video after the break.

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WCH CH32M030: Another Microcontroller To Watch Out For

January 16, 2026 by 49 Comments

One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in following the world of new semiconductor devices, spotting interesting ones while they are still just entries on manufacturer websites, and then waiting for commonly-available dev boards. With Chinese parts there’s always a period in which Chinese manufacturers and nobody else has them, and then they quietly appear on AliExpress.

All of which brings us to the WCH CH32M030, a chip that’s been on the radar for a while and has finally broken cover. It’s the CH32 RISC-V microcontroller you may be familiar with, but with a set of four half-bridge drivers on board for running motors. A handy, cheap, and very smart motor controller, if you will.

There’s been at  least one Chinese CH32M030 dev board (Chinese language) online for a while now, but the one listed on AliExpress appears to be a different design. At the time of writing the most popular one is still showing fewer than 20 sales, so we’re getting in at the ground floor here.

We think this chip is of interest because it has the potential to be used in low price robotic projects, replacing as it does a couple of parts or modules in one go. If you use it, we’d like to hear from you!

An SD Card Of Your Own For Microcontroller Projects

January 13, 2026 by 22 Comments

If you’ve wiring up a microcontroller and need some kind of storage, it’s likely you’ll reach for an SD card. Compared to other ways of holding data on your project, SD cards are just so much cheaper, resilient to physical and magnetic shocks, and simpler to work with from both a hardware and software perspective. On the other hand, it might seem silly to put a SD card slot on a board that’s never going to see a replacement card. [DIY GUY Chris] wants to advertise a solution for that: a cardless SD card chip by XTX that can act as a drop-in replacement for your projects. 

The XTXD0*G series are NAND flash chips of precisely the sort you’d find in an SD card, except without the SD card. That means you can use your usual SD card access libraries to speed prototyping, but skip the BOM cost of an actual card reader. In his Instructable and the video embedded below [Chris] shows how he used the 4 Gbit version, the XTSD04GLGEAG to make a custom SD-compatible breakout board that is equally happy in your laptop’s card reader or on a breadboard.

To get it plugged into the breadboard, [Chris] is using the standard 2.54 mm headers you can get anywhere; to get it plugged into a card reader, he’s just relying on the PCB being cut to shape. [Chris] notes that you’ll want to have the board built at 0.6 mm thickness if you’re going to plug it in like a micro SD card.

Of course once you’ve gotten used to the little NAND chips, there’s no need to put them on breakouts but this looks like a fun way to test ’em out. You don’t need to keep your flash chip on an SD-card sized PCB, either; we saw something similar used to make modern game cartridges. If you insist on using a standard SD card and don’t want to buy a slot, you can certainly DIY that instead. 

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A Much Faster Mac On A Microcontroller

January 11, 2026 by 6 Comments

Emulating older computers on microcontrollers has been a staple of retrocomputing for many years now, with most 8-bit and some 16-bit machines available on Atmel, ARM, or ESP32 platforms. But there’s always been a horsepower limit, a point beyond which a microcontroller is no longer enough, and a “proper” computer is needed. One of those barriers now appears to have been broken, as microcontroller-based emulation moves into the 32-bit era. [Amcchord] has the Basilisk II emulator ported to the ESP32-P4 platform, providing a 68040 Mac able to run OS8.1. This early-1990s-spec machine might not seem like much in 2026, but it represents a major step forward.

The hardware it uses is the M5Stack Tab5, and it provides an emulated Mac with up to 16 MB of memory. Remember, in 1992 this would have been a high-spec machine. It manages a 15 frames per second refresh rate, which is adequate for productivity applications. The emulator uses the Tab5’s touchscreen to emulate the Mac mouse alongside support for USB input devices. To 1990 hackers, it’s almost the Mac tablet you didn’t know you would want in the future.

We like this project, both because it’s advancing the art of emulation on microcontrollers, and also because it delivers a computer that’s useful for some of the things you might have done with a Mac in 1992 and could even do today. Pulling this out on the train back then would have blown people’s minds. There’s even a chance that MacOS on something like this would turn a few heads in 2026. It’s certainly not the first emulated Mac we’ve seen though.

TinyCore Board Teaches Core Microcontroller Concepts

December 11, 2025 by 32 Comments

Looking for an educational microcontroller board to get you or a loved one into electronics? Consider the tinyCore – a small and nifty octagon-shaped ESP32 board by [MR. INDUSTRIES], simplified for learning yet featureful enough to offer plenty of growth, and fully open.

The tinyCore board’s octagonal shape makes it more flexible for building wearables than the vaguely rectangular boards we’re used to, and it’s got a good few onboard gadgets. Apart from already expected WiFi, BLE, and GPIOs, you get battery management, a 6DoF IMU (LSM6DSOX) in the center of the board, a micro SD card slot for all your data needs, and two QWIIC connectors. As such, you could easily turn it into, say, a smartwatch, a motion-sensitive tracker, or a controller for a small robot – there’s even a few sample projects for you to try.

You can buy one, or assemble a few yourself thanks to the open-source-ness – and, to us, the biggest factor is the [MR.INDUSTRIES] community, with documentation, examples, and people learning with this board and sharing what they make. Want a device with a big display that similarly wields a library of examples and a community? Perhaps check out the Cheap Yellow Display hacks!

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Speech Synthesis On A 10 Cent Microcontroller

October 31, 2025 by 62 Comments

Speech synthesis has been around since roughly the middle of the 20th century. Once upon a time, it took remarkably advanced hardware just to even choke out a few words. But as [atomic14] shows with this project, these days it only takes some open source software and 10-cent microcontroller

The speech synth is implemented on a CH32V003 microcontroller, known for its remarkably low unit cost when ordered in quantity. It’s a speedy little RISC-V chip running at 48 MHz, albeit with the limitation of just 16 KB of Flash and 2 KB of SRAM on board.

The microcontroller is hooked up to a speaker via a simple single-transistor circuit, which allows for audio output. [atomic14] first demonstrates this by having the chip play back six seconds of low quality audio with some nifty space-saving techniques to squeeze it into the limited flash available. Then, [atomic14] shows how he implemented the Talkie library on the chip, which is a softwarehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZvX95aXSdM implementation of Texas Instruments’ LPC speech synthesis architecture—which you probably know from the famous Speak & Spell toys. It’s got a ton of built in vocabulary out of the box, and you can even encode your own words with some freely available tools.

We’ve seen [atomic14] tinker with these chips before, too.

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10 Cent Microcontroller Makes Tracker Music

October 29, 2025 by 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.

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