Tiny Tapeout 3: Get Your Own Chip Design To A Fab

March 5, 2023 by Joseph Long 12 Comments

Custom semiconductor chips are generally big projects made by big companies with big budgets. Thanks to Tiny Tapeout, students, hobbyists, or anyone else can quickly get their designs onto an actual fabricated chip. [Matt Venn] has announced the opening of a third round of the Tiny Tapeout project for March 2023.

In 2022, Tiny Tapeout 1 piloted fabrication of user designs onto custom chips referred to as application-specific integrated circuits or ASICs. Following success of the pilot round, Tiny Tapeout 2 became the first paid version delivering guaranteed silicon. For Tiny Tapeout 2, there were 165 submissions. Most submissions were designed using a hardware description language such as Verilog or Amaranth, but ASICs can also be designed in the visual schematic capture tool Wokwi.

Each submitted design must fit within 150 by 170 microns. That footprint can accommodate around one thousand standard cells, which is certainly enough to explore a digital system of real interest. Examples from Tiny Tapeout 2 include digital neurons, FPGAs, and RISC-V processor cores.

Once the 250 designs are submitted, they’ll be combined into a large grid along with a controller. The controller will receive input signals and pump the inputs via a scan chain through the entire grid to each design. The results from each design continue through the scan chain to be output from the grid. Since all 250 designs will be combined on to one chip, each designer will receive everybody else’s design along with their own. This shared process opens a huge opportunity for experimentation.

To get started on your own ASIC design right away, visit Tiny Tapeout. Also check out the talk [Matt] gave at Supercon 2022: Bringing Chip Design to the Masses along with his Zero to ASIC videos. And we’re not saying anything official, but he’ll probably be giving a workshop at Hackaday Berlin.

Continue reading “Tiny Tapeout 3: Get Your Own Chip Design To A Fab” →

Supercon 2022: Michael Whiteley Saves The Badge

March 3, 2023 by Joseph Long 6 Comments

Michael Whiteley (aka [compukidmike]) is a badgelife celebrity. Together, he and his wife Katie make up MK Factor. They have created some of the most popular electronic conference badges. Of course, even experts make mistakes and run into challenges when they dare to push the envelope of technology and delivery schedules. In his Supercon 2022 talk, There’s No Rev 2: When Badgelife Goes Wrong, Mike shares details from some of his worst badge snafus and also how he managed to gracefully pull them back from the edge of disaster.

Living the Badgelife

Attendees at the world’s largest hacker convention, DEF CON in Las Vegas, had already become accustomed to receiving and wearing very cool and novel admission tokens, more properly known as badges. Then in 2006, at DEF CON 14, everything changed. Designed by Joe Grand, the first electronic DEF CON badge was a circuit board featuring a tiny PIC microcontroller, two LEDs, and a single pushbutton. Badgelife was born.

DEF CON 30 Humans Sampling Board

Mike begins his war stories with one about the DEF CON 30 badge. This was a herculean project with 25,000 badges being produced on a short timeline in the ever-changing chaos of a semiconductor supply-chain meltdown. Even though many regard it as one of the best DEF CON badges ever made, the DC30 badge posed a number of challenges to its creators. Microcontrollers were in short supply during 2021 and 2022 forcing the badge team to keep an eye on component vendor supplies in order to snipe chips as soon as they appeared in stock. The DC30 badge was actually redesigned repeatedly as different microcontrollers fluctuated in and out of supply. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Michael Whiteley Saves The Badge” →

The completed oscilloscope in parts, with the screen in the front connected with prototyping wires, protoboarded buttons on the right, and the BlackPill board somewhere behind

DIY STM32 Scope Is Simple, Cheap, And Featureful

February 27, 2023 by Arya Voronova 28 Comments

Would you like to have a small digital oscilloscope? Do you have a spare BlackPill (STM32F401) board and a TFT display laying around? [tvvlad1234] presents us with a simple and educational digital storage oscilloscope design that barely needs any components for you to build one, and it’s packed with features just like you would expect from a self-respecting open-source project. Not just that — it can even stream data to your computer, in a format compatible with the TekScope software!

It’s hard to overshadow just how easy this scope is to build, use, and hack on. You really don’t need much in the way of parts, a protoboard will do, though you can also etch or order your own PCBs. The front-end is super straightforward to find components for and assemble, a few opamps and resistors is all you need. So after jumper-wiring the LCD and three push buttons to your BlackPill, you’re golden.

Of course, the simple frontend results in the input range being from -3.3 V to 3.3 V, but as you could guess, this is exactly the kind of project where you could tweak the resistors and even upgrade it later on. Are you a bit lost in how oscilloscopes work? [tvvlad1234] has an explainer for you, too!

This build could easily take up a honorary “temporary turned permanent” place on your bench, thanks to its McGyver-esque qualities. It’s also, quite possibly, a better scope than the red “soldering kit” ones we’ve seen online. All in all, it’s a strong contender in the “simple and powerful DIY scope” arena, before this, we’ve seen one built with an Arduino Nano, and one with a Pi Pico.

The sensor hub in all its glory, sensor itself on top, standing on 3D-printed feet, and the PCB on the bottom

Hacker-Friendly And Elegant Air Quality Sensor Hub

February 27, 2023 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

Ever wanted an indoor environment sensor that’s dead simple yet a complete package? That’s the anotter-sensor-hub project from [Jana Marie], designed for the Sensirion SEN05x series sensors, with a SEN055 sensor shown in the picture above. Given such a sensor, you can measure VOCs and NOCs (Volatile and Non-Volatile Organic Compounds), as well as PM1, PM2.5, PM4 and PM10 particulate matter indices, with temperature and humidity sensing thrown in for good measure. Fully open and coupled with 3D printable stand files, this alone makes for an air quality hub fit for a hacker’s desk. That’s not all, however — this board’s elegant extensibility is a good match for the sensor’s impressive capabilities!

The PCB itself might look simple, it’s simply an ESP32 and some supporting circuitry required. But you’ll notice there’s also a trove of connector footprints for different interfaces; whatever else you might want to add to your sensor hub, whether it connects through I2C, SPI or PWM, you can! As usual, the sensor itself is the most expensive part of such a project — the boards themselves are around $5 USD apiece fully assembled, but one sensor-included hub will set you back roughly $42 USD. That said, it’s a great value for the price, and the trove of sensing data you can get might just more than pay for itself in quality-of-life improvements you make. Of course, everything is open-source and comes as a complete packages for you to start using. The firmware, KiCad files, 3D holder and even Grafana dashboard files can be found on GitHub.

Such air quality sensor platforms have been getting more and more popular, and hackers have been paying attention. Having a full open-source package like this at our disposal is amazing. If you’re looking for a cheaper “baby’s first air quality sensor”, drop by your local IKEA — there’s a way less featureful but quite cheap sensor that you can equip with an ESP8266, perhaps, even on a custom PCB.

OpenStructures Is A Modular Building System For The RepRap Age

February 21, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 24 Comments

Modular construction toys like LEGO and Meccano are great for prototyping, but they aren’t so great for large builds. OpenStructures promises to be a modular building system for projects large and small.

Originally conceived in 2007 by [Thomas Lommée], OpenStructures is a modern, more robust reinterpretation of Grid Beam, which was itself a reinterpretation of the earlier Living Structures. By using a common standard (PDF), parts can be reused project after project as they would with LEGO, meaning you can spend more time building and less time cutting or figuring out joints. OpenStructures parts need connection points, part diameters, or part dimensions at multiples of 20 mm to be compatible. To fulfill the spirit of the project, parts should be designed for disassembly, use recyclable materials when possible, and be Open Source.

The system seems like a great starting point for prototyping furniture or other large builds more quickly than building everything on a case-by-case basis. By including diameters for round objects as well as square and rectangular profiles, OpenStructures is a more flexible (and aesthetically pleasing?) option than Grid Beam.

A couple more options for furniture-scale modular construction are these big LEGO bricks or copper pipe.

(via Low Tech Magazine)

A wooden box sits on a darker wooden table. The box has a red, glowing number 8 on it.

Ambient Display Tells You If Borealis Is Coming To Town

January 29, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

For those times when you’d rather not get sucked down another internet rabbit hole when you really just wanted the weather, an ambient display can be great. [AlexanderK106] built a simple ambient display to know the probability the Northern Lights would visit his town.

Starting with a NodeMCU featuring the ESP8266, [AlexanderK106] walks us through a beginner-friendly tutorial on how to do everything from configure the Arduino IDE, the basics of using a breadboard. finding a data source and parsing it, and finally sticking everything into an enclosure.

The 7-segment display is taped and set into the back of the 1/4″ pine with enough brightness to shine through the additional layer of veneer on top. The display is set to show one digit and then the next before a three second repeat. A second display would probably make this easier to use day-to-day, but we appreciate him keeping it simple for this tutorial.

Looking for more ambient displays? Checkout the Tempescope or this clock that lets you feel the temperature outside!

All About USB-C: High-Speed Interfaces

January 17, 2023 by Arya Voronova 40 Comments

One amazing thing about USB-C is its high-speed capabilities. The pinout gives you four high-speed differential pairs and a few more lower-speed pairs, which let you pump giant amounts of data through a connector smaller than a cent coin. Not all devices take advantage of this capability, and they’re not required to – USB-C is designed to be accessible for every portable device under the sun. When you have a device with high-speed needs exposed through USB-C, however, it’s glorious just how much USB-C can give you, and how well it can work.

The ability to get a high-speed interface out of USB-C is called an Alternate Mode, “altmode” for short. The three altmodes you can encounter nowadays are USB3, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, there’s a few that have faded into obscurity like HDMI and VirtualLink, and some are up and coming like USB4. Most altmodes require digital USB-C communication, using a certain kind of messages over the PD channel. That said, not all of them do – the USB3 is the simplest one. Let’s go through what makes an altmode tick. Continue reading “All About USB-C: High-Speed Interfaces” →