An ASIC For A Secret File

March 24, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Some time over a decade ago, the arrival of inexpensive PCB fabrication revolutionised the creation of custom electronics on a budget. It’s now normal for even the smallest projects we feature here to have a professional PCB, which for those of us who started by etching their own with ferric chloride is nothing short of a miracle. When it comes to the ultimate step in custom electronics of doing the same for integrated circuits though, it’s fair to say that this particular art is in its infancy. The TinyTapeout project is a collaborative effort in which multiple designers have the chance to make their own ASIC as a single tile on a chip along others, and [Bitluni] had the chance to participate. His ASIC? A secret file which could be read through his ESP32 to VGA board.

The video below the break then is both the tale of the secret file project, and that of TinyTapeout itself, which is a clever design involving an on-board microcontroller that selects the tile and manages the bus. This revision is Tiny Tapeout 3, which includes 249 tiles of contributor-generated circuitry holding a diverse array of projects.

The secret file itself is a motion GIF, compressed down until the point at which it will just fit on a tile. We’ll preserve the fun by not reveling what it us, but you probably won’t be surprised when you see it in the video.

We’ve featured TinyTapeout more then once, not least when [Matt Venn] gave a talk about it for Supercon 2022.

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Share Screen To RGB Panel With Pi Pico W

August 28, 2022 by Danie Conradie 13 Comments

RGB LEDs are great for adding a bit of color to your life, and it’s even more satisfying to use a matrix of them as a graphic display. [bitluni] built an RGB LED display with Pi Pico to which you can share a pixelated version of your PC’s screen.

[bitluni] wanted to gain some experience with MicroPython on the Raspbery Pi Pico W, and had previously used WebSockets to transmit display data over WiFi. Unfortunately, the available MicroPython WebSockets implementation didn’t leave enough RAM for the rest of the code. Instead, he set up a simple HTTP server on the Pico that receives the pixel data as a POST request. This makes for a slow refresh rate but still looks great, especially with the 3D printed rear-projection frame.

To send display data from the computer, [bitluni] uses a simple locally hosted HTML page that takes the Pico’s IP address, and prompts you to select the display or window you want to share. It uses JavaScript to grab the display data, generate the required low-res pixel values, and send the POST request.

This looks like a fun weekend project to add to your lab or home and only costs about $20 in parts. It’s basically a scaled-down version of his giant ping pong ball wall display.

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Hackaday Podcast 056: Cat Of 9 Heads, Robot Squats, PhD In ESP32, And Did You Hear About Sonos?

February 28, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gab on great hacks of the past week. Did you hear that there’s a new rev of the Pi 4 out there? We just heard… but apparently it’s release into the wild was months ago. Fans of the ESP8266 are going to love this tool that flashes and configures the board, especially for Sonoff devices. Bitluni’s Supercon talk was published this week and it’s a great roadmap of all the things you should try to do with an ESP32. Plus we take on the Sonos IoT speaker debacle and the wacky suspension system James Bruton’s been building into his humanoid robot.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 056: Cat Of 9 Heads, Robot Squats, PhD In ESP32, And Did You Hear About Sonos?” →

Bitluni Brings All The ESP-32 Multimedia Hacks To Supercon

February 24, 2020 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Of all the people I was looking forward to meeting at Supercon, aside from my Hackaday colleagues with whom I had worked for five years without ever meeting, was a fellow from Germany named Matthias Balwierz. The name might not ring a bell, but he’ll certainly be familiar to Hackaday readers as Bitluni, the sometimes goofy but always entertaining and enlightening face of “Bitluni’s Lab” on YouTube.

I’d been covering Bitluni’s many ESP32 hacks over the years, and had struck up a correspondence with him, swapping ideas and asking for advice on the many projects I start but somehow never finish. Luckily for us, Bitluni is far better on follow-through than I am, and he brought that breadth and depth of experience to the Design Lab stage for that venue’s last talk of the 2019 Superconference, before the party moved next door for the badge-hacking presentations.

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ESP32 Video Tricks Hack Chat With Bitluni

March 25, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the ESP32 Video Tricks Hack Chat!

The projects that bitluni works on have made quite a few appearances on these pages over the last couple of years. Aside from what may or may not have been a street legal electric scooter, most of them have centered around making ESP32s do interesting tricks in the analog world. He’s leveraged the DACs on the chip to create an AM radio transmitter, turned an oscilloscope into a video monitor, and output composite video. That last one was handy for turning a Sony Watchman into a retro game console. He’s also found ways for the ESP32 to output VGA signals. Looks like there’s no end to what he can make the versatile microcontroller do.

Although the conversation could (and probably will) go anywhere, we’ll start with video tricks for the ESP32 and see where it goes from there. Possible topics include:

Tricks for pushing the ESP32 DACs to their limits;
When to use an external DAC;
Optimizing ESP32 code by running on separate cores; and
What about HDMI on the ESP32?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the ESP32 Video Tricks Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 27, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

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 Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

The Precise Science Of Whacking A Wine Glass

July 31, 2018 by Ben James 12 Comments

It’s common knowledge that tapping a wine glass produces a pitch which can be altered by adjusting the level of the tipple of choice inside. By filling twelve glasses with different amounts of liquid and tuning them to the twelve notes of the scale, it’s possible to make a one-octave instrument – though the speed and polyphony are bottle-necked by the human operator. If you think it sounds like a ripe project for automation, you’re correct: [Bitluni’s lab] has done what needed to be done, and created a MIDI instrument which plays the glasses using mallets.

Electronically it’s a simple build – some 12 V solenoids driven by MOSFETs, with an Arduino in charge. For the mechanical build, a 3D printer proved very useful, as each mallet could be made identical, ensuring a consistent tone across all glasses. Rubber covers printed in flexible filament were fitted to reduce the overtones and produce a clearer sound. [Bitluni] also utilised different types of glasses for the low and high pitches, which also helped to improve the clarity of the tone.

MIDI is of course the perfect protocol for this application; simple, lightweight and incredibly widely used, it’s the hacker’s delight for projects like this. The instrument can perform pre-programmed sequences, or be played live with a MIDI controller. Both of these are shown in the video after the break – stick around for a unique rendition of Flight Of The Bumblebee. For a more compact wine glass based music creation solution, we recommend this nifty project, which alters pitch using a water balloon raised and lowered into the glass by a servo. Continue reading “The Precise Science Of Whacking A Wine Glass” →