Fat Bottomed-Keebs, You Make The Clackin’ World Go Round

October 9, 2020 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

Depending on the circles you run in, it can seem like the mechanical keyboard community is all about reduced layouts, and keebs without ten-keys are about as big as it gets. But trust us, there’s plenty of love out there for the bigger ‘boards like [Ben]’s tasty fat-bottomed keyboard. Man oh man, what a delicious slab of throwback to the days when keyboards doubled as melee weapons.

More specifically, this is a 199-key modified Sun Type 5 layout. It runs on two Teensy 2.0s — one for the keyboard matrix, and one for everything else. [Ben] made the metal enclosure entirely by hand without a CNC or laser cutter. While I don’t personally care for linear switches, I have mad respect for these, which are vintage Cherry Blacks pulled from various 1980s AT/XT boards. That 10-key island on the left is dedicated to elementary macros like undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, and open/close/save.

We absolutely love the gigantic rotary encoders, which give it a bit of a boombox look. There’s even reuse involved here, because the encoder knobs are made from jam jar lids that are stuffed with homemade Sugru. [Ben] can use them to play PONG on the LCD and other games not yet implemented on the everything-else Teensy.

Here’s another Sun-inspired keeb, but this one has a reverse 10-key layout that matches the DTMF phone dial.

Developing An Open Source Electronics Trainer

October 7, 2020 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

It’s a safe bet that most Hackaday reader’s interest in electronics started at a young age, and that their early forays into the world of hardware hacking likely involved some form of “playground” kit. As long as you didn’t lose any of the components, these kits promised the user that hundreds of possible projects were just a few jumper wires away. Extra points awarded for when you decide to toss away the manual and fly solo.

While there’s still no shortage of such products on the market, [Josh Kittle] felt the concept could do with a freshening up. His open hardware “Microcontroller Trainer” harkens back to those old multi-kits, but adds in the sort of high-tech gadgetry that makes the modern DIY world go round.

It’s still got the traditional layout: a center mounted breadboard surrounded by an array of LEDs, a handful of buttons, and a pair of potentiometers. But there’s also sockets for the Raspberry Pi, ESP8266, ESP32, and Arduino. Plus a few of their most popular friends to keep them company: a .96″ OLED, 2.4″ Touch TFT, and a BC05 Bluetooth module.

Originally [Josh] created this design to help clean up his own workspace, figuring he could just put his most used components on a single compact board. But as you might expect, others expressed interest in the concept. Now he’s producing them as kits, and even working his way towards a third hardware revision that adds features such as an integrated 18650 battery for portable use.

While electronics kits that have you build a functional device are a great way to learn the ropes, we’re always glad to see fresh takes on the classic electronic “playground” concept.

Dice Roller Keeps Germs Out Of Your Snake Eyes

October 5, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Do you need a to find a more sanitary way to roll the dice at your next socially-distanced board game gathering? [CJA3D]’s pop-o-matic mason jar dice roller can roll the bones two different ways — either by hitting that big, inviting arcade button, or though a web app that everyone can access on their own phones.

We think this looks great, and is a great reuse of a glass jar. The brains of this operation is an ESP8266, which drives a continuous-rotation servo underneath the dice. Push the button or use the web app and the servo disturbs the plate, moving the dice around.

Besides the sanitary aspect, one benefit of using the web app is that there are four different speed presets for the servo. As a bonus, [CJA3D] included the files for a pair of printed 6-sided dice. Click through to the project to see it in action.

We know you take games seriously, and so do we. Just look at this dice roller that uses machine vision to ensure fairness.

Minimal TinyAVR 0 Programming

October 5, 2020 by Al Williams 10 Comments

When [Alain] wanted to use some of the new TinyAVR 0 chips — specifically, the Attiny406 — it seemed overkill to use the Windows IDE. There are plenty of sources of information on programming other AVR chips using simple command line tools, but not for these newer 0-series parts which use a new programming protocol known as UPDI. That led to a deep diving into how to program a TinyAVR 0 with a text editor, makefile, and USB-to-serial cable.

The Attiny406 has 4K of flash, 256 bytes of RAM and can run at 20 MHz with no external clock. You might think programming would be similar to a regular AVR part, but these tiny devices use UPDI (Unified Programming and Debug Interface) which uses 3 pins for programming. Older devices used different protocols.

It is very easy to create a UPDI programmer. A USB to logic-level serial cable and a 4.7K resistor is all it takes. There’s Python code that knows how to drive the protocol, too. You can also use the logic-level serial port on the Raspberry Pi with some device tree modifications explained in the code’s documentation.

[Alain] made a nice breakout board for the device. It fits a breadboard, allows for 5V or 3.3V operation, and has an LED and switch. Nothing fancy, but handy. Once you know how to ship a hex file to the chip, the rest is pretty standard. While the AVR version of gcc doesn’t cross-compile for the ATTiny out of the box, there is a device pack from Microchip that enables that feature.

The trend is to go to bigger processors, not smaller, but when you need to cram something in a small space, save a few pennies per unit, or draw very little power, these tiny processors can be just the ticket. The processors may be small, but if you work you can do some pretty big things with them.

Indian RISC-V Chip Is Team’s Third Successful Chip

October 3, 2020 by Al Williams 20 Comments

There was a time when creating a new IC was a very expensive proposition. While it still isn’t pocket change, custom chips are within reach of sophisticated experimenters and groups. As evidence, look at the Moushik CPU from the SHAKTI group. This is the group’s third successful tapeout and is an open source RISC-V system on chip.

The chip uses a 180 nm process and has 103 I/O pins. The CPU runs around 100 MHz and the system includes an SDRAM controller, analog to digital conversion, and the usual peripherals. The roughly 25 square mm die houses almost 650 thousand gates.

This is the same group that built a home-grown chip based on RISC-V in 2018 and is associated with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. We aren’t clear if everything you’d need to duplicate the design is in the git repository, but since the project is open source, we presume it is.

If you think about it, radios went from highly-specialized equipment to a near-disposable consumer item. So did calculators and computers. Developing with FPGAs is cheaper and easier every year. At this rate it’s not unreasonable to think It won’t be long before creating a custom chip will be as simple as ordering a PCB — something else that used to be a big hairy deal.

Of course, we see FPGA-based RISC-V often enough. While we admire [Sam Zeloof’s] work, we don’t think he’s packing 650k gates into that size. Not yet, anyway.

Continue reading “Indian RISC-V Chip Is Team’s Third Successful Chip” →

Even More Firmware In Your Firmware

October 1, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 13 Comments

There are many ways to update an embedded system in the field. Images can fly through the air one a time, travel by sneaker or hitch a ride on other passing data. OK, maybe that’s a stretch, but there are certainly a plethora of ways to get those sweet update bytes into a target system. How are those bytes assembled, and what are the tools that do the assembly? This is the problem I needed to solve.

Recall, my system wasn’t a particularly novel one (see the block diagram below). Just a few computers asking each other for an update over some serial busses. I had chosen to bundle the payload firmware images into the binary for the intermediate microcontroller which was to carry out the update process. The additional constraint was that the blending of the three firmware images (one carrier and two payload) needed to happen long after compile time, on a different system with a separate toolchain. There were ultimately two options that fit the bill.

Continue reading “Even More Firmware In Your Firmware” →

Pulse Generator Does The Job With An STM8

October 1, 2020 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

When working with hardware, whether a repair or a fresh build, it’s often necessary to test something. Depending on what you’re working with, this can be easy or a total pain if you can’t get the right signal to the right place. To eliminate this frustrating problem, [WilkoL] built a useful pulse generator for use in the lab.

[WilkoL] notes that historically, the job of generating pulses of varying length and frequency would be achieved with a smattering of 555 timers. While this is a perfectly cromulent way to do so, it was desired to take a different approach for the added flexibility modern hardware can offer. The pulse generator is instead built around an STM8 microcontroller; an unusual choice in this era, to be sure. [WilkoL] specified the part for its incredibly low cost, and highly capable timer hardware – perfect for the job.

Combined with an ST7735 TFT LCD screen, and programmed in bare metal for efficiency’s sake, the final project is installed in a project box with controls for frequency and pulse length – no more, no less. Capable of pulse lengths from 250 ns to 90 s, and frequencies from 10 mHz to 2 MHz, it’s a tool that should be comfortable testing everything from servos to mechanical counters.

Of course, if you need to get down to picosecond timescales, an avalanche pulse generator might be more your speed. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Pulse Generator Does The Job With An STM8” →