Turning Horrible Browser Controls Into A Game

July 15, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

With all of the various keyboards, mouses (mice?), and other human interface devices (HID) available for our computers, there’s no possible way for developers to anticipate every type of input for every piece of software they build. Most of the time everything will work fine as long as some basic standards are kept, both from the hardware and software sides, but that’s not always the case. [Losso] noticed a truly terrible volume control method when visiting certain websites while also using a USB volume knob, and used this quirk to build a Breakout game with it.

It turns out his volume control knob would interact simultaneously with certain video players’ built-in volume control and the system volume for the operating system, leading to a number of undesirable conditions. However, the fact that this control is built in to certain browsers in the first place led to this being the foundation for the Breakout clone [Losso] is calling KNOB-OUT. Unlike volume buttons on something like a multimedia keyboard, the USB volume control knob can be configured much more easily to account for acceleration, making it more faithful to the original arcade version of the game. The game itself is coded in JavaScript with the source code available right in the browser.

If you’d like to play [Losso]’s game here’s a direct link to it although sometimes small web-based projects like these tend to experience some slowdown when they first get posted here. And, if you’re looking for some other games to play in a browser like it’s the mid-00s again, we’re fans of this project which brings the unofficial Zelda game Zelda Classic to our screens.

Two of these boards next to each other, one showing the front, assembled, side with the MCU and supporting components soldered on, and the other showing the back, patch panel, side, with wires connecting the MCU pads to testpoints leading to the supporting components

Try Out MCUs With This Jumperable TSSOP20 Adapter

June 29, 2024 by Arya Voronova 7 Comments

There are so many new cool MCUs coming out, and you want to play with all of them, but, initially, they tend to be accessible as bare chips. Devboards might be hard to get, not expose everything, or carry a premium price. [Willmore] has faced this problem with an assortment of new WCH-made MCUs, and brings us all a solution – a universal board for TSSOP20-packaged MCUs, breadboard-friendly and adaptable to any pinout with only a few jumpers on the underside.

The board brings you everything you might want from a typical MCU breakout – an onboard 3.3V regulator, USB series resistors, a 1.5K pullup, decoupling capacitors, and a USB-C port. All GPIOs are broken out, and there’s a separate header you can wire up for all your SWD/UART/USB/whatever needs – just use the “patch panel” on the bottom of the board and pick the test points you want to join. [Willmore] has used these boards for the CH32Vxxx family, and they could, no doubt, be used for more – solder your MCU on, go through the pin table in the datasheet, do a little point-to-point wiring, and you get a pretty functional development board.

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Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More

April 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plastic needs to be sacrificed.

Granted, the scope in question, a Fnirsi DSO152, only cost [David Given] from Poking Technology a couple of bucks. And while the little instrument really isn’t that bad inside, it’s limited to a single channel and 200 kHz of bandwidth, so it’s not exactly lab quality. The big attractions for [David] were the CH32F103 microcontroller and the prominent debug port inside, not to mention the large color LCD panel.

[David]’s attack began with the debug port and case mods to allow access, but quickly ground to a halt when he accidentally erased the original firmware. But no matter — tracing out the pins is always an option. [David] made that easier by overlaying large photos of both sides of the board, which let him figure out which buttons went to which pins, and mapping for the display’s parallel interface. He didn’t mess with any of the analog stuff except to create a quick “Hello, oscilloscope!” program to output a square wave to the calibration pin. He did, however, create a display driver and port a game of breakout to the scope — video after the hop.

We’ve been seeing a lot of buzz around the CH32xx MCUs lately; seeing it start to show up in retail products is perhaps a leading indicator of where the cheap RISC chips are headed. We’ve seen a few interesting hacks with them, but we’ve also heard tell they can be hard to come by. Maybe getting one of these scopes to tear apart can fix that, though.

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RPDot: The RP2040 Dev Board Barely Bigger Than The Chip

August 25, 2023 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

Is [William Herr]’s RPDot actually the world’s smallest RP2040 dev board? We can’t say for sure, but at 10 mm on a side, we’d say it has a pretty good shot at the record.

Not that it really matters, mind you — the technical feat of building a fully functional dev board that’s only 3 mm longer on each side than the main chip is the kind of stuff we love to see. [William] says he took inspiration from the [SolderParty] RP2040 Stamp, which at one inch (25.4 mm) on a side is gigantic compared to the RPDot. Getting the RP2040 and all the support components, which include an 8MB QSPI Flash chip, a 3V3 LDO, a handful of 0201 passives, and even a pair of pushbuttons, required quite a lot of design tweaking. He started his PCB design as a four-layer board; while six layers would have made things easier, the budget wouldn’t allow such extravagance for a prototype. Still, he somehow managed to stuff everything in the allotted space and send the designs off — only to get back defective boards.

After reordering from a different vendor, the real fun began. Most of the components went on the front side of the board and were reflowed using a hot plate. The RP2040 itself needed to go on the back side, which required gentle hot air reflow so as not to disrupt the other side of the board. The results look pretty good, although those castellated edges look a little worse for the wear. Still, for someone who only ever worked with 0402 components before, it’s pretty impressive.

[William] says he’s going to open-source the designs as well as make some available for sale. We’ll be looking out for those and other developments, but for now, it’s just pretty cool to see such SMD heroics.

A handheld game console made from bare PCBs

Minimalist Homebrew Hardware Recreates Arcade Classics

January 22, 2023 by Robin Kearey 1 Comment

Classic video games might look primitive by today’s standards, but the addictive gameplay of Breakout or Pac-Man remains fun no matter what decade you were born in. Keeping the relevant hardware running becomes harder as the years pile up however, so when [Michal Zalewski] decided to introduce his kids to classic video games, he didn’t dig up his old game consoles. Instead, he decided to recreate several games from scratch using the bare minimum amount of hardware needed.

The first project is a copy of Snake, the arcade classic that millennials will recognize from their Nokia phones. [Michal] made an initial version using an ATmega328P with an 8×8 LED matrix as a display, but quickly upgraded the hardware to a 16×16 display powered by an ATmega644, and added an LED seven-segment display to show the score. All parts are simply soldered onto a piece of prototyping board, with no need for any custom PCBs or enclosures.

Game #2 is a side-scrolling space shooter called Dino in Space. This game runs on an ATmega1284 and uses a 4×20 character text display, allowing simple graphics as well as an on-screen score counter. Similar hardware, although with a 128×64 graphic OLED screen, powered game #3, a Breakout/Arkanoid clone called Blockbuster 7000.

[Michal]’s blog post is filled with interesting tips for real-life game programming. For example, a true random number generator creates a rather odd-looking bunch of asteroids in space – tweaking the distribution to make it a bit more uniform greatly enhances the game’s playability. Source files for all games are available on [Michal]’s website, and include a description of the exact hardware setup needed for each game.

Recreating Snake on custom hardware is sort of a rite of passage for microcontroller hackers, as you can see in many impressive projects. Breakout-style games can also be implemented on various hardware platforms, including analog oscilloscopes.

Pocket Computer Reminds Us Of PDAs

June 23, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage in the ’90s and early ’00s, although for cutting-edge tech from that era plenty of these devices had astronomical price tags. This Arduino-based PDA hearkens back to that era, albeit with a much more accessible parts list.

The build is based around an Arudino Nano with an OLED screen and has the five necessary functions for a PDA: calculator, stopwatch, games, phonebook, and a calendar. With all of these components on such a small microcontroller, memory quickly became an issue when using the default libraries. [Danko] uses his own custom libraries in order to make the best use of memory which are all available on the project’s GitHub page. The build also includes a custom PCB to keep the entire pocket computer pocket-sized.

There are some other features packed into this tiny build as well, like the breakout game that can be played with a potentiometer. It’s an impressive build that makes as much use of the microcontroller’s capabilities as is possible, and if you enjoy projects where a microcontroller is used as if it is a PC take a look at this Arduino build with its own command-line interface.

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Slice Through Your Problems With A Shukran

February 4, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 38 Comments

We’d wager most hackers are familiar with FTDI as the manufacturer of the gold standard USB-UART interfaces. Before parts like the ultra cheap CH340 and CP2102 became common, if you needed to turn a USB cable into a TTL UART device, “an FTDI” (probably an FT232RL) was the way to make that happen. But some of the parts in the FT232* family are capable of much more. Wanting to get at more than a UART, [linker3000] designed the Shukran to unlock the full potential of the FT232H.

The FT232H is interesting because it’s an exceptionally general purpose interface device. Depending on configuration it can turn USB into UART, JTAG, SPI, I2C, and GPIO. Want to prototype the driver for a new sensor? Why bother flashing your Teensy when you can drive it directly from the development machine with an FT232H and the appropriate libraries?

The Shukran is actually a breakout for the “CJMCU FT232H” module available from many fine internet retailers. This board is a breakout that exposes a USB-A connecter on one side and standard 0.1″ headers on the other, with a QFN FT232H and all the passives in the middle. But bare 0.1″ headers (in a square!) require either further breadboarding or a nest of jumper wires to be useful. Enter the Shukran. In this arrangement, the CJMCU board is cheap and handles the SMT components, and the Shukran is easy to assemble and makes it simple to use.

The Shukran gives you LEDs, buttons and switches, and a bunch of pull up resistors (for instance, for I2C) on nicely grouped and labeled headers. But most importantly it provides a fused power supply. Ever killed the USB controller in your computer because you forgot to inline a sacrificial USB hub? This fuse should take care of that risk. If you’re interested in building one of these handy tools, sources and detailed BOM as well as usage instructions are available in the GitHub repo linked at the top.