New Part Day: ATMegas With Programmable Logic

March 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 60 Comments

Since Microchip acquired Atmel, the fields of battle have fallen silent. The Crusaders have returned home, or have been driven into the sea. The great microcontroller holy war is over.

As with any acquisition, there is bound to be some crossover between two product lines. Both Atmel’s AVR platform and Microchip’s PICs have their adherents, and now we’re beginning to see some crossover in the weird and wonderful circuitry and design that goes into your favorite microcontroller, whatever that might be. The newest part from Microchip is an ATMega with a feature usually found in PICs. This is a Core Independent Peripheral. What is it? Well, it’s kinda like a CPLD stuck in a chip, and it’s going to be in the new Arduino board.

The ATMega4809 is the latest in a long line of ATMegas, and has the features you would usually expect as the latest 8-bit AVR. It runs at 20MHz, has 48 K of Flash, 6 K of SRAM, and comes in a 48-pin QFN and TQFP packages. So far, everything is what you would expect. What’s the new hotness? It’s a Core Independent Peripheral in the form of Configurable Custom Logic (CCL) that offloads simple tasks to hardware instead of mucking around in software.

So, what can you do with Configurable Custom Logic? There’s an application note for that. The CCL is effectively a look-up table with three inputs. These inputs can be connected to I/O pins, driven from the analog comparator, timer, UART, SPI bus, or driven from internal events. The look-up table can be configured as a three-input logic gate, and the output of the gate heads out to the rest of the microcontroller die. Basically, it’s a tiny bit of programmable glue logic. In the application note, Microchip provided an example of debouncing a switch using the CCL. It’s a simple enough example, and it’ll work, but there are a whole host of opportunities and possibilities here.

Additionally, the ATMega4809, “has been selected to be the on-board microcontroller of a next-generation Arduino board” according to the press release I received. We’re looking forward to that new hardware, and of course a few libraries that make use of this tiny bit of custom programmable logic.

Friday Hack Chat: Everything PCB

February 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

It was not too long ago that all PCB design packages were proprietary. Getting PCBs made was expensive, and if you tried to do this over the Internet, the best way was to download a board house’s proprietary software, design your board in their software suite, and send your boards off to be made. A 5 cm square board would cost two hundred dollars. I know this to be true because I’ve said it before, and no one has corrected me.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking Everything PCB with OSH Park. OSH Park is the leading creators of perfect purple PCBs. They have POGs, and for the last two weeks, they’ve been one of the few places you can send some Gerbers to and have it manufactured in a timely manner if you live in the US. Because China was closed.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about everything PCB. How do you do castellated holes? How do you mill slots and square or otherwise non-round holes? Internal cutouts? Stop mask expansion? Artwork? Panelization? Why purple? More POGs!

Our guests for this chat will be [Dan Sheadel] and [Drew Fustini] of OSH Park, and they’re going to be there answering all your questions. [Dan] has been around OSH Park from the beginning and enjoys designing tiny useless robots and mentoring students building better ones. [Drew] is an Open Source hardware developer, firmware designer, a BeagleBoard board member, and is usually found at hardware meetups wearing purple.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down Friday, March 2nd at noon, Pacific time. Want to know what time this is happening in your neck of the woods? Have a countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Fail Of The Week: The Little Ultrasonic Knife That Couldn’t

February 27, 2018 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

We all know the feeling of an idea that sounded great when it was rattling around in our head, only to disappoint when we actually build the thing. It’s a natural consequence of trying new stuff, and when it happens, we salvage what we can and move on, hopefully in wisdom.

The thing that at least semi-defeated [This Old Tony] was an attempt to build an ultrasonic cutter, and it didn’t go well. Not that any blood was shed in the video below, although there seemed like there would be the way [Old Tony] was handling those X-Acto blades. His basic approach was to harvest the transducer and driver from a cheap ultrasonic cleaner and retask the lot into a tool to vibrate a knife rapidly enough to power it through tough materials with ease.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work very well. We think the primary issue was using a transducer that was vastly underpowered compared to commercial (and expensive) ultrasonic cutters, but we suspect the horn he machined was probably not optimized either. To be fair, modeling the acoustic performance of something like that isn’t easy, so we can’t expect much. But still, it seems like the cutter could have worked better. Share your thoughts on how to make version 2.0 better in the comments.

The video is longish, but it’s as entertaining as any of [Old Tony]’s videos, and packed full of incidental gems, like the details of cavitation. We enjoyed it, even if the results were suboptimal. If you want to see a [This Old Tony] project that really delivers, check out his beautiful boring head build.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: The Little Ultrasonic Knife That Couldn’t” →

One Week Left For Hackaday Belgrade Proposals

February 27, 2018 by Mike Szczys No comments

Do you have your tickets for Hackaday Belgrade? Our premiere European conference is on 26 May and tickets are on a rapid trajectory to sell out.

Those of you weighing the idea of presenting a talk, you now have less than one week to get your proposal to us. While we have already accepted several exemplary talks, final decisions won’t be made until after the submission deadline passes on Sunday, March 4th.

Mike Harrison showing off his demo work on the 2016 Hackaday Belgrade badge. If you have stories of the demoscene, consider sending in a talk proposal.

What kind of talks are we looking for? We’d love to have a few talks about the demoscene. The conference badge this year is a full-blown retrocomputer, and we’re working on a BASIC for it. If you can push pixels on a Comodore 64, we’d love to hear you talk about it. We’re also suckers for the lesser known stories of tech history (Mike Harrison’s talk on the Eidophor projector tech all but forgotten to history was a delight).

We’re always interested in creative design; think circuit boards that aren’t square and enclosures that go beyond just putting something in a simple box. And of course we’re forever in search of the rare gems that share a glimpse of the research world, like this computing cluster built to get around limited supercomputer time when calculating quantum effect simulations.

These are great talks presented to an audience hungry to share your excitement. Get those proposals in by the end of this weekend!

Hackaday Links: February 25, 2018

February 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Hipster hardware! [Bunnie] found something interesting in Tokyo. It’s a LED matrix display, with a few PDIP chips glued onto the front. There are no through-holes or vias, and these PDIPs can’t be seen through on the back side of the board. Someone is gluing retro-looking chips onto boards so it looks cool. It’s the ‘gluing gears to everything therefore steampunk’ aesthetic. What does this mean for the future? Our tubes and boxes of 74-series chips will be ruined by a dumb kid with a hot glue gun when we’re dead.

Is it Kai-CAD or Key-CAD? Now you can share your troubles with the greatest problem in Electronic Design Automation with others.

Speaking of unimaginable problems in EDA suites and PCB design tools, here’s a Git-based visual version control thingy for Eagle. Cadlab.io is a version control system for Github and Eagle that offers visual diff of PCB layouts and schematics. Neat? Yes, especially if you have more than one person working on a board.

How about a 3D printed business card embosser? [Taekyeom] designed and printed a pair of 3D rollers, one of which is embossed with the ‘negative’ of a design, the other with the ‘positive’ of a design. When rolled against each other, these rollers mesh and putting a piece of paper through the pinky pinching machine embosses paper. Add a frame, a handle, and a few zip ties for belts, and you have a fully 3D printed paper embosser.

There’s a new ransomware that encrypts your files and won’t allow you to access them until you pay someone some crypto. Big news, huh? Well, yes, actually. The HC7 Planetary ransomware is apparently the first bit of ransomware that accepts Etherium. ETH is all grown up now.

Aw, snap, 3D printers with automatic tool changing. This is a project from E3D that shows off magnetic (?) extruders and hot ends for 3D printers. You can change your hot end (and nozzle, and filament) in mid-print. What does this mean? Well, swapping filament is the most obvious use case, but the Prusa system might have this nailed down. What is more interesting is swapping hotends, allowing you to print in multiple temperatures (and different materials), and maybe even different nozzle sizes. This is coming to MRRF, the greatest 3D printing con on the planet. MRRF is happening in March 23-25th in beautiful scenic Goshen, Indiana.

A hardware demoscene? Yes, it’s true! #badgelife is a hardware demoscene wrapped up around wearable conference badges. We just had a meetup in San Francisco this week, and the talks were amazing. [Kerry Scharfglass] talked about scaling one Diamond Age badge to one hundred Diamond Age badges. [Whitney Merrill] talked about building badges for the Crypto and Privacy village at Defcon. If you’re into electronics, you are, by default, into manufacturing and this is the best education in manufacturing and logistics you will ever get. The true pros know how to reduce air freight costs by two hundred percent!

Retrotechtacular: The Best Jeep Commercial Ever

February 21, 2018 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

How often do we find ourselves thankful for advertising? When it comes to Hackaday’s Retrotechtacular column it’s actually quite often since it snapshots a moment in culture and technology. Today’s offering is a shining example, where we get a great look into vehicular utility of the day that is rarely seen in our modern lives.

The origin story of the Jeep is of course its prominence in World War II when more than half a million were produced. GIs who drove the vehicles constantly during the war greatly appreciated the reliability and versatility and wanted one for their own when returning home and a market rose up to satisfy that need. The modern equivalent would be the Hummer fad that started in the 1990’s. Humvee, the early ancestor of the Hummer, replaced the Jeep in the US military in the 1980’s and a version called Hummer entered the consumer market in ’92. But that was more of a comfort-meets-icon proposition, where the Jeep of the 1950’s (seen in the commercial below) delivered — even over delivered — on a promise of utility.

In this ad, the case is made for Jeep as farm implement, acting as plow, mower, even post hole digger. As a firefighting implement the announcer boasts that “One man with a Jeep can do the work of 100 men with shovels” by cutting fire breaks into the soil. It’s sold as the workhorse of cemeteries, ranches, county service crews, and anything else their marketing gurus could write into copy. We think the metrics are dubious but certainly the inexpensive build, versatile nature, and need for power equipment across the countryside brought these Jeeps into widespread rural and industrial service in myriad roles.

Power take off driving shaft to power circular saw. You can also see the hydraulics that lift and lower the saw.

What makes most of this possible is the existence of a power take-off (PTO). This is a mechanical connection from the engine of the vehicle to external components that can be switched out. Once connected, the speed of the engine can be controlled to adjust the power take-off operation. In conjunction with a hydraulic system that can lift and lower the implement, it becomes a remarkably versatile system. We begin to wonder the American vernacular includes the saying “it’s like the Swiss Army knife of…” rather than calling everything that’s insanely useful a Jeep.

Connect a pump to the PTO and you have a fire-fighting Jeep. Connect a generator and you can drive electric tools like the chainsaw used to cut down a tree in the video and to power an arc welder. There’s a gnarly-looking circular saw blade, and you’re going to spill your coffee when you get to the “Jeep-a-trench”. That’s right, a trenching attachment gives the vehicle’s suspension a rough workout. It boasts the ability to dig down six feet and complete the footings for an ordinary house in just three hours.

Willy’s MB, the company behind the Jeep must have employed a crew of hackers. What a blast it would have been to be in the research and development sessions to come up with 1,001 more uses for the equipment. The company has a bit of Jeep history you can peruse, but we’d really love to hear about the addon equipment ideas that didn’t make the cut. Are there any readers who have some stories along these lines? Let us know in the comments below.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Best Jeep Commercial Ever” →

Friday Hack Chat: Trusting The Autorouter

February 21, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 41 Comments

Ah, the autorouter. Inside every PCB design tool, there’s a function called the ‘autorouter’. This function, when used correctly, is able to automagically lay traces between pads, producing a perfect board in under a minute. The trouble is, no one uses it. We have been told not to trust the autorouters and we hear a lot of other dire warnings about it. The autorouter never works. The autorouter will put traces everywhere. The autorouter doesn’t consider floorplanning, and sometimes you’re going to get traces that go right through the edge of your board. Is avoiding the autorouter sound advice?

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking about trusting the autorouter. The autorouter is just a tool, and like any tool, it will do exactly what you tell it. The problem, therefore, is being smart enough to use the autorouter.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is Ben Jordan, Director of Community Tools and Content at Altium. Ben is a Computer Systems engineer, with 25 years experience in board-level hardware and embedded systems design. He picked up a soldering iron at 8, and wrote some assembly at 12. He’s also an expert at using an autorouter successfully.

In this Hack Chat, we’re going to talk to Ben about Altium, Circuit Maker, and how to get the best performance out of an autorouter. How do you set the autorouter up? How do you test your settings? What, actually, is the technology and math that goes into an autorouter? What is the best way to design a multilayer board? How do you do multiboard designs? And what’s the deal with mixed signals?

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down Friday, February 23rd at noon, Pacific time. Want to know what time this is happening in your neck of the woods? Here, look at the neat time zone converter thingy.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.