Arduino VGA, The Old Fashioned Way

November 30, 2024 by 10 Comments

Making a microcontroller speak to a VGA monitor has been a consistent project in our sphere for years, doing the job for which an IBM PC of yore required a plug-in ISA card. Couldn’t a microcontroller talk to a VGA card too? Of course it can, and [0xmarcin] is here to show how it can be done with an Arduino Mega.

The project builds on the work of another similar one which couldn’t be made to work, and the Trident card used couldn’t be driven in 8-bit ISA mode. The web of PC backwards compatibility saves the day though, because many 16-bit ISA cards also supported the original 8-bit slots from the earliest PCs. The Arduino is fast enough to support the ISA bus speed, but the card also needs the PC’s clock line to operate, and it only supports three modes:  80 x 25, 16 colour text, 320 x 200, 256 colour graphics, and 640 x 480, 16 colour graphics.

Looking at this project, it serves as a reminder of the march of technology. Perhaps fifteen years or more ago we’d have been able to lay our hands on any number of ISA cards to try it for ourselves, but now eight years after we called the end of the standard, we’d be hard placed to find one even at our hackerspace. Perhaps your best bet if you want one is a piece of over-the-top emulation.

Artificial Intelligence Runs On Arduino

October 24, 2024 by 23 Comments

Fundamentally, an artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing more than a system that takes a series of inputs, makes some prediction, and then outputs that information. Of course, the types of AI in the news right now can handle a huge number of inputs and need server farms’ worth of compute to generate outputs of various forms, but at a basic level, there’s no reason a purpose-built AI can’t run on much less powerful hardware. As a demonstration, and to win a bet with a friend, [mondal3011] got an artificial intelligence up and running on an Arduino.

This AI isn’t going to do anything as complex as generate images or write clunky preambles to every recipe on the Internet, but it is still a functional and useful piece of software. This one specifically handles the brightness of a single lamp, taking user input on acceptable brightness ranges in the room and outputting what it thinks the brightness of the lamp should be to match the user’s preferences. [mondal3011] also builds a set of training data for the AI to learn from, taking the lamp to various places around the house and letting it figure out where to set the brightness on its own. The training data is run through a linear regression model in Python which generates the function that the Arduino needs to automatically operate the lamp.

Although this isn’t the most complex model, it does go a long way to demonstrating the basic principles of using artificial intelligence to build a useful and working model, and then taking that model into the real world. Note also that the model is generated on a more powerful computer before being ported over to the microcontroller platform. But that’s all par for the course in AI and machine learning. If you’re looking to take a step up from here, we’d recommend this robot that uses neural networks to learn how to walk.

An Arduino Triggers A Flash With Sound

October 15, 2024 by 38 Comments

To capture an instant on film or sensor with a camera, you usually need a fast shutter. But alternately a flash can be triggered with the scene in the dark and the shutter wide open. It’s this latter technique which PetaPixel are looking at courtesy of the high-speed class at Rochester Institute of Technology. They’re using a cheap sound sensor module and an Arduino to catch instantaneous photographs, with students caught in the act of popping balloons.

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DIY 3D-Printed Arduino Self-Balancing Cube

October 13, 2024 by 16 Comments

Self-balancing devices present a unique blend of challenge and innovation. That’s how [mircemk]’s project caught our eye. While balancing cubes isn’t a new concept — Hackaday has published several over the years — [mircemk] didn’t fail to impress. This design features a 3D-printed cube that balances using reaction wheels. Utilizing gyroscopic sensors and accelerometers, the device adapts to shifts in weight, enabling it to maintain stability.

At its core, the project employs an Arduino Nano microcontroller and an MPU6050 gyroscope/accelerometer to ensure precise control. Adding nuts and bolts to the reaction wheels increases their weight, enhancing their impact on the cube’s balance. They don’t hold anything. They simply add weight. The construction involves multiple 3D printed components, each requiring several hours to produce, including the reaction wheels and various mount plates. After assembly, users can fine-tune the device via Bluetooth, allowing for a straightforward calibration process to set the balancing points.

If you want to see some earlier incarnations of this sort of thing, we covered other designs in 2010, 2013, and 2016. These always remind us of Stewart platforms, which are almost the same thing turned inside out.

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Stretch Goal: 300X Arduino

September 26, 2024 by 5 Comments

The Faboratory at Yale University has set a number of stretch goals. We don’t mean that in the usual sense. They’ve been making, as you can see in the video below, clones of commercial devices that can stretch over 300%. They’ve done Ardunios and similar controllers along with sensors. The idea is to put computer circuits in flexible robots and other places where flexibility is key, like wearable electronics.

If you are interested in details, you’ll want to read the paper in Science Robotics. They take the existing PCB layout and use a laser to cut patterns in a paper mask over the stretchable substrate. They then apply oxidized gallium-indium to build conductors.

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Be Your Own DJ With QN8066 And An Arduino Library

August 10, 2024 by 5 Comments

The QN8066 is a fun little FM transmitter chip. It covers the full FM broadcast band and has built-in DSP. You would find this sort of part in car cell phone adapters before every vehicle included Bluetooth or an AUX port.  [Ricardo] has created an Arduino library to bring the QN8066 to the masses.

The chip is rather easy to use – control is handled with a common I2C interface. All the complex parts – Phase Locked Loop (PLL), RF front end, power management, and audio processing are all hidden inside. [Ricardo’s] library makes it even easier to use. One of the awesome features of the 8066 is the fact that it handles Radio Data System (RDS). RDS is the subcarrier datastream that allows FM stations to inject information like song title and artist into the signal. The data is then displayed on your radio screen.

You can find the source to [Ricardo’s] library on GitHub. Using it is as simple as picking it up from the Arduino IDE.

If you are looking for an RDS-enabled radio to test out your QN8066 design, you wouldn’t do too bad with this Gameboy cartridge receiver.

Click through the break for a video from [Ricardo] explaining his QN8066 design. Continue reading “Be Your Own DJ With QN8066 And An Arduino Library” →

Undo Arduino Encryption With An Oscilloscope

July 14, 2024 by 16 Comments

Cryptography ain’t easy. Seemingly small details like how many times a computationally intensive loop runs can give the game away. [Lord Feistel] gives us a demo of how this could work with nothing more than poorly designed code, a resistor, and an oscilloscope.

The hardware side is, as mentioned, really simple. Put a resistor inline with the Arduino and monitor the voltage drop across the resistor with the scope. When the chip is working hard, it consumes more current, and code sections that take longer will show up as longer dips.

On the software end, it’s only a little more complicated.  The RSA encryption scheme involves a lot of exponentiation and modulo-taking. Here, [Lord Feistel] is targeting a naive way of computing the exponents quickly, and demonstrates how you can read the exponent straight out the chip’s power demand.

Implementing this attack against a real-world RSA algorithm, in the context of the Arduino doing other stuff, will be harder. And we don’t know if the algorithm implemented in “standard” Arduino libraries is smarter than this one. (If you know, let us know in the comments.) But still, this is a cool example of just how simple and straightforward it can be to eavesdrop on bad code.

If you only need to bypass encryption instead of breaking it, check out [Lord Feistel]’s other tutorial on power glitching that we featured previously. If you haven’t played around with the hardware side of security, it gets deep pretty quickly, but you can at least dip your toes in the shallow end with what you’ve got in your closet.