Matt Venn Helps You Make ASICS

February 17, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 12 Comments

What would you make if you were given about ten square millimeters of space on a silicon wafer on a 130 nm process? That’s the exact question that the Open MPW program asks, and that [Matt Venn] has stepped up to answer. [Matt] came to Remoticon in 2020 to talk about his journey from nothing to his own ASIC, and he came back in 2021 to talk about what has happened in a year.

image of the metal layers of an IC — [maxiborga] has been making beautiful renders of his and others’ chip designs

We expected great designs, but the variety of exciting and wonderful designs that have been submitted we think exceeded our expectations. [Matt] goes through quite a few of them, such as an analog neuron, a RISC-V Arduino-compatible microprocessor, and a satellite transceiver. Perhaps an unexpected side effect has been the artwork. Since the designs are not under an NDA, anyone can take the design and transform it into something gorgeous.

Of course, all of this hardware design isn’t possible without an open toolchain. There is an SRAM generator known as OpenRAM that can generate RAM blocks for your design. Coriolis2 is an RTL to GDS tool that can do placement and routing in VLSI. Finally, FlexCell is a cell library that tries to provide standard functions in a flexible, customizable way that cuts down on the complexity of the layout. There are GitHub actions that can run tests and simulations on PRs to keep the chip’s HDL in a good state.

However, it’s not all roses, and there was an error on the first run (MPW1). Hold time violations were not detected, and the clock tree wasn’t correct. This means that the GPIO cannot be set up, so the designs in the middle could be working, but without the GPIO, it is tricky to determine. With a regular chip, that would be the end, but since [Matt] has access to both the layout and the design, he can identify the problem and come up with a plan. He’s planning on overriding the IO setup shift register with an auxiliary microcontroller. (Ed Note: [tnt] has been making some serious progress lately, summarized in this video.)

It is incredible to see what has come from the project so far, and we’re looking forward to future runs. If this convinces you that you need to get your own ASIC made, you should check out [Matt]’s “Zero to ASIC” course.

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PendulumSynth Ties Music And Physics Together

February 17, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Many musicians will be familiar with the metronome, a pendulum charged with generating a rhythmic tick to keep one’s performance in regular time. With PendulumSynth, [mrezanvari] takes the same basic pendulum but uses it in an altogether different musical way.

The build relies on a 10-inch plastic ball to serve as the weighted end of the pendulum, stuffed with a STM32F411CE BlackPill board, a BNO085 IMU, and an nRF radio module for sending out data for external processing. The pendulum’s motion is turned into MIDI data or CV for output to musical hardware which handles actually generating the output sounds.

The system operates in a variety of modes. Gravity mode outputs continuous MIDI data and CV relative to the continuous motion of the pendulum, while DIV3 mode tracks the pendulum’s motion and outputs 3 regular trigger points that correspond as such.

The combination of the intuitive physical nature of the pendulum and its sheer large size makes for an enticing musical exhibit. We’ve seen some other great musical installation pieces before, too. Video after the break.

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The Electrifying Debate Around Where Lightning Comes From

February 17, 2022 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Along with many other natural phenomena, lightning is probably familiar to most. Between its intense noise and visuals, there is also very little disagreement that getting hit by a lightning strike is a bad thing, regardless of whether you’re a fleshy human, moisture-filled plant, or conductive machine. So it’s more than a little bit strange that the underlying cause of lightning, and what makes certain clouds produce these intense voltages along ionized air molecules, is still an open scientific question.

Many of us have probably learned at some point the most popular theory about how lightning forms, namely that lightning is caused by ice particles in clouds. These ice particles interact to build up a charge, much like in a capacitor. The only issue with this theory is that this process alone will not build up a potential large enough to ionize the air between said clouds and the ground and cause the lightning strike, leaving this theory in tatters.

A recent study, using data from Earth-based radio telescopes, may now have provided fascinating details on lightning formation, and how the charge may build up sufficiently to make us Earth-based critters scurry away to safety when dark clouds draw near.

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High-Power Laser Salvaged From Headlights

February 17, 2022 by Al Williams 55 Comments

[DiodeGoneWild]’s latest video lives up to the name. He takes apart a laser headlight to recover a pretty powerful blue laser. You can see the video, below.

The headlights work with blue laser diodes that excite phosphor to produce white light. Removing the outside trappings revealed a three-pin laser diode (the case is the third pin). There’s also a substantial heatsink. Removing the diode from the assembly is difficult, but it is easy enough to leave it in the heatsink and use the existing connector.

Of course, the phosphor and a filter have to go. Some destructive work with a screwdriver and pliers broke out the optics from a diode he’d destroyed trying to remove it. Then he replaced the optics on the remaining diode with the modified housing.

With a low-current test, the diode didn’t lase but did act as a regular LED. More current did the trick, though. The laser without the optics made a line rather than a spot but still had enough power to melt some plastic and light matches. To get a parallel beam, the internal lens needs to move closer to the diode, and a drill bit allowed that to happen, which reduced the beam’s divergence quite a bit, but didn’t create the best result.

With the proliferation of cheap laser modules, it is really worth scrapping a headlight? Maybe. But it is an interesting look inside of a modern headlight, either way. We’ve peeked inside these headlights before. Maybe you can turn those old headlights into an oven.

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Sending MIDI Wirelessly With The NRF24L01

February 17, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

MIDI is a standard known by musicians and instruments all over the world. The basic twist on regular serial has helped studios around the world to work more efficiently. [Kevin] wanted to try sending MIDI data wirelessly, but rather than the typical Bluetooth solution, decided to use the humble nRF24L01 instead.

The circuitry used is simple: [Kevin] simply wired up two Arduino Unos with nRF24L01 radio modules, which communicate over SPI. Alternatively, an even quicker solution is to use a Keywish Arduino RF Nano, which packs a nRF24L01 on board. One Arduino can then be hooked up to a MIDI OUT port on an instrument, and it will send out MIDI signals wirelessly. The second Arduino can then be plugged into a MIDI IN port and repeat out what it receives over the air.

The real work was in the firmware, which takes MIDI data and packages it in a suitable form to send out over the nRF24L01. The system can operate in a one-to-one mode, emulating a single MIDI cable, or a multicast mode, where one sender transmits information to many receivers.

It’s a neat hack and one we could imagine would be useful in some fun performance situations. We’ve seen others do work on wireless MIDI interfaces for Eurorack hardware, too. Video after the break.

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Coin-Operated Graphing Calculator Console

February 16, 2022 by Chris Lott 8 Comments

Longtime hacker [Peter Jansen] was so impressed with a piece in The Onion from last year that he decided to build this coin-operated Texas Instruments graphing calculator console on a whim (video below the break — warning vertical orientation).

With nothing more to go on than the fake mock-up pictured from the original satirical article, [Peter] was able to scale the dimensions from the photo making a few reasonable assumptions. He built the project over the holidays, enlisting his father and daughter as helpers. The cabinet is framed in 2×3 lumber and faced with wood veneer covered plywood and vinyl overlays for the graphics.

The computing power is from a Raspberry Pi with an Arduino Uno serves as an I/O processor. It was a bit tricky to control a calculator with only two knobs, but he makes it work. However, at 25 cents per plot with no apparent hard-copy capability, this console calculator might be a bit pricey for all but casual plotting over a few beers at the local pub.

You might remember [Peter] from some of his hacks we featured over the years, like his home-brew CT scanner or placing fourth in the first Hackaday Prize contest in 2014 with the open sourced tricorder project.

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A PNG Based Circuit Simulator

February 16, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 12 Comments

We’re sure thousands of hours have been spent in Minecraft implementing digital logic. Inspired by that, [lynnpepin] created a digital logic simulator named Reso that is based on pixels rather than voxels.

There are a few clever things here. First, different colors represent different parts. There are three different colors of wire, output and input wires, XOR gates, and AND gates. OR gates are just output wires, which or all the input wires together. By implementing these gates, Reso is, by definition, Turing complete. Since it’s just a PNG, it is trivial to open it up in GIMP and copy and paste one bit of the circuit multiple times. The different color wires are mainly to help route in a 2d plane, as you don’t have vias. Currently, the image compiles into a graph that is executed. [Lynn] chose code readability and ease of prototyping over premature optimization, so the code isn’t particularly fast. But it is pretty fun, squinting at the pixels that make up the adders and clocks he has on his blog. After giving Reso your image, it outputs a series of images that enumerate the state for several states.

The code is available on Github, and a Rust version has already been written that offers some impressive speed improvements at the expense of not being at feature parity yet. If MS-Paint isn’t your IDE of choice, perhaps a more Javascript-based digital logic simulator might be more to your taste.