Arduino Provides No Fuss SNES-To-USB Conversion

January 20, 2024 by 14 Comments

Even for those of us who are fans of retrocomputing, it’s fair to say that not everyone plays their old-school games on real old-school hardware. The originals are now fragile and expensive, and emulators are good enough that if the gaming experience is all you’re after there’s little point in spending all that cash.

There’s one place in which the originals sometimes have the edge though, the classic controllers are the personal interface with the game. So when [Dome] found a SNES controller in an Akibahara shop, of course he picked it up. How to make it talk to a PC? Tuck an Arduino Pro Micro inside it, of course!

What we like about this project is that instead of ripping out the original electronics it instead hooks the Arduino board onto the original serial interface. We might have made a Nintendo socket to USB box to keep the original cable, but either way, the SNES (technically Super Famicom, because it’s a Japanese market unit) original stays true to its roots. The Arduino polls the clock line at the speed of the console, reads the result, and translates it to a USB interface for the computer. There’s a full run-down of the code and how it was made, should you wish to try.

Of course, if you don’t always have a PC handy, you could also put the whole computer in the controller.

Arduino, Virtually

January 17, 2024 by 3 Comments

While simulating an Arduino isn’t a new idea, a recent project by [LRusso] provides an open source JavaScript simulator that runs in your browser. You can try it out live or host it yourself if you prefer.

The simulator looks much like the standard IDE, so there isn’t much to learn. You can select from several targets, including a UNO R3, a MEGA 1280, a MEGA 2560, or a NANO V3. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see the correct number of digital pins, analog pins, and the serial monitor. The code is relatively new, and we noticed that the digital and output pins seem to work only for outputs. There is no way to modify any of the values from the user interface. You can, however, enter things into the serial monitor.

You can run a canned demo that uses digital and analog output. There is also another sample that uses the serial port. Unlike some other simulators, you can’t really add much external circuitry but, for some purposes, that isn’t a problem.

If you are looking for more, there is Simulide, which is also free. Falstad can do mixed signal simulations with Arduino code. There’s also Wokwi, which we’ve covered a few times before.

Remote-Control Kinetic Sand Table Uses A Single Arduino

January 7, 2024 by 11 Comments

There’s nothing fun about a Sisyphean task unless you’re watching one being carried out by someone or something else. In that case, it can be mesmerizing like this Arduino-driven kinetic sand table.

What you can’t see. Image via [thang010146] on YouTube
Like many of these builds, it all started with an ordinary coffee table from the hacker’s favorite furnitüre store. [NewsonsElectronics] opened it up and added a 3mm-thick board to hold the sand and another to hold the rails and magnets.

After designing some pieces to connect the rails and pulleys together, [NewsonsElectronics] let the laser cutter loose on some more 3mm stock. A pair of stepper motors connected to a CNC shield do all of the work, driving around a stack of magnets that causes the ball bearing to trudge beautifully through the sand.

Be sure to check out the videos after the break. The first is a nice demonstration, and the second is the actual build video. In the third video, [NewsonsElectronics] explains how they could write the world’s smallest GRBL code to swing this with a single Arduino. Hint: it involves removing unnecessary data from the g-code generated by Sandify.

Don’t have a laser cutter? Here’s a sand table built from 3D printer parts.

Continue reading “Remote-Control Kinetic Sand Table Uses A Single Arduino” →

CH32 RISC-V MCUs Get Official Arduino Support

January 4, 2024 by 25 Comments

Like many of you, we’ve been keeping a close eye on the CH32 family of RISC-V microcontrollers from WCH Electronics. You can get the CH32V003, featuring 2 kB RAM and 16 kB of flash for under fifteen cents, and the higher-end models include impressive features like onboard Ethernet. But while the hardware is definitely interesting, the software side of things has been a little rocky compared to what we’ve come to expect from modern MCUs.

Things should start looking up a bit though with the release of an Arduino core for the CH32 direct from WCH themselves. It’s been tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and supports the CH32V00x, CH32V10x, CH32V20x, CH32V30x, and CH32X035 chips. Getting it installed is as easy as adding the URL to the Arduino IDE’s Boards Manager interface, though as the video below shows, running it on Linux does require an extra step or two.

So far, we’ve seen several projects, like this temperature sensor or this holiday gizmo that use [cnlohr]’s open-source toolchain. But there’s no question that plenty of hobbyists out there feel more comfortable in the Arduino environment, and if those folks are now able to pick up a CH32 and do something cool, that means more people jumping on board, more libraries developed, more demo code written…you get the idea.

Just like the ESP8266’s popularity exploded when it was added to the Arduino IDE, we’ve got high hopes for the CH32 family in the coming months.

Continue reading “CH32 RISC-V MCUs Get Official Arduino Support” →

A High-End Studio Multiplexer Surrenders To An Arduino

December 27, 2023 by 17 Comments

The equipment used in professional radio and TV studios is both extremely high quality and very expensive indeed, and thus out of the reach of an experimenter. Happily as studios are refurbished there’s a steady supply of second-hand equipment which can be surprisingly cheap, but as [Nathan] found out with a Quartz audio router, comes with no control software. What’s to be done with what’s essentially a piece of junk? Remove its brain and replace it with one that can be controlled, of course!

On the PCB alongside a bank of switch matrices is an FPGA which does the heavy lifting. That’s “heavy” in a limited sense, because all it does is handle the chip select lines for the matrices and write data to their registers. This is a task that can be handled by a microcontroller, so in goes an Arduino Nano, which along with a few other board modifications delivers a serial-controlled studio router.

The interesting part for us in this project comes from a look at the date codes on the board, they’re from the early 2000s. This is (roughly) contemporary with the ATmega chip on the Arduino, so we’re curious as to why the designers saw fit to use an FPGA when the microcontrollers of the day were clearly up to the task for much less outlay. We suspect a touch of millennium-era price inflation, but we can’t be sure.

Meanwhile, old broadcast kit has featured here before.

Ultra-Basic Thermal Camera Built Using Arduino Uno

December 22, 2023 by 17 Comments

Thermal cameras can cost well into the five-figure range if you’re buying high-resolution models with good feature sets. New models can be so advanced that their export and use is heavily controlled by certain countries, including the USA. If you just want to tinker at the low end, though, you don’t have to spend a lot of scratch. You can even build yourself something simple based on an Arduino Uno!

The build uses Panasonic’s cheap “Grid-EYE” infrared array as the thermal sensor, in this case, a model with an 8×8 array of thermopiles. It’s not going to get you any fancy images, especially at long range, but you can use it to get a very blocky kind of Predator-vision of the thermal radiation environment. It’s a simple matter of hooking up the Grid-EYE sensor to the Arduino Uno over I2C, and then spitting out the sensor’s data in a nice visual form on a cheap TFT screen.

It’s a great introduction to the world of thermal imaging. There’s no better way to learn how something works by building a working example yourself. We’ve featured a few similar projects before, too; it’s all thanks to the fact that thermal sensors are getting cheaper and more accessible than ever!

Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin

December 21, 2023 by 22 Comments

[Trent M. Wyatt]’s CPUVolt library provides a fast way to measure voltage using no external components, and no I/O pin. It only applies to certain microcontrollers, but he provides example Arduino code showing how handy this can be for battery-powered projects.

The usual way to measure VCC is simple, but has shortcomings.

The classical way to measure a system’s voltage is to connect one of your MCU’s ADC pins to a voltage divider made from a couple resistors. A simple calculation yields a reading of the system’s voltage, but this approach has two disadvantages: one is that it constantly consumes power, and the other is that it ties up a pin that you might want to use for something else.

There are ways to mitigate these issues, but it would be best to avoid them entirely. Microchip application note 2447 describes a method of doing exactly that, and that’s precisely what [Trent]’s Arduino library implements.

What happens in this method is one selects Vbg (a fixed internal voltage reference that is temperature-independent) as Vin, and selects Vcc as the ADC’s voltage reference. This is essentially backwards from how the ADC is normally used, but it requires no external hookup and is only a bit of calculation away from determining Vcc in millivolts. There is some non-linearity in the results, but for the purposes of measuring battery power in a system or deciding when to send a “low battery” signal, it’s an attractive solution.

Being an Arduino library, CPUVolt makes this idea very easy to use, but the concept and method is actually something we have seen before. If you’re interested in the low-level details, then check out our earlier coverage which goes into some detail on exactly what is going on, using an ATtiny84.