A Cheap DIY PLC Based On The Atmega328P

August 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

If you’re running a big factory, you’ve probably got a massively expensive contract with a major programmable logic controller (PLC) manufacturer. One shudders to think about the cost of the service subscription on that one. If you’re working on a smaller scale, though, you might consider a DIY PLC like this one from [Mr Innovative.]

PLCs are rarely cutting-edge; instead, they’re about reliability and compliance with common industry standards. To that end, this design features the ATmega328P. Few other microcontrollers are as well understood or trusted as that one. The device is compatible with RS232 and RS485 and will run off 24 VDC, both of which you would find in a typical industrial environment. It offers 24 V digital inputs and outputs, as well as analog inputs and outputs from 0 to 10 V. [Mr Innovative] demonstrates it by hooking up a DWIN human-machine interface (HMI) for, well… human interaction, and a variable frequency drive to run a motor.

If you want to run a basic industrial-lite system but can’t afford the real industrial price tag, you might enjoy tinkering around at this level first. It could be a great way to get a simple project up and running without breaking the bank. Video after the break.

Continue reading “A Cheap DIY PLC Based On The Atmega328P” →

Can You Hack The RP2350? There’s $10,000 On The Line

August 12, 2024 by Lewin Day 63 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Foundation had their new RP2350 chip audited by Hextree.io, and now, both companies want to see if you can hack it. Just to prove that they’re serious, they’re putting out a $10,000 bounty. Can you get inside?

The challenge to hack the chip is simple enough. You need to dump a secret that is hidden at OTP ROW 0xc08. It’s 128 bits long, and it’s protected in two ways—by the RP2350’s secure boot and by OTP_DATA_PAGE48_LOCK1. Basically, the chip security features have been activated, and you need to get around them to score the prize.

The gauntlet was thrown down ahead of DEF CON, where the new chip was used in the event badges. Raspberry Pi and Hextree.io invited anyone finding a break to visit their booth in the Embedded Systems Village. It’s unclear at this stage if anyone claimed the bounty, so we can only assume the hunt remains open. It’s been stated that the challenge will run until 4 PM UK time on September 7th, 2024.

Hacking microcontrollers is a tough and exacting art. The GitHub repo provides full details on what you need to do, with the precise rules, terms, and conditions linked at the bottom. You can also watch the challenge video on Hextree.io.

Raspberry Has A New Pico, Built With The New RP2350

August 8, 2024 by Elliot Williams 129 Comments

Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts of custom real-time shenanigans. And that’s not to discount the impact of the Pi Pico, the $4 dev kit built around it.

Today, they’re announcing a brand-new microcontroller: the RP2350. It will come conveniently packaged in the new Pi Pico 2, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the new chip is better in every way, and that the Pico form factor will stay the same. The bad news? It’s going to cost 25% more, coming in at $5. But in exchange for the extra buck, you get a lot.

For starters, the RP2350 runs a bit faster at 150 MHz, has double the on-board RAM at 520 kB, and twice as much QSPI flash at 4 MB. And those sweet, sweet PIOs? Now it has 12 instead of just 8. (Although we have no word yet if there is more program space per PIO – even with the incredibly compact PIO instruction set, we always wanted more!)

Two flavors on the same chip: Arm and RISC

As before, it’s a dual-core chip, but now the cores are Arm Cortex M33s or RISC-V Hazard3s. Yes, you heard that right, there are two pairs of processors on board. Raspberry Pi says that you’ll be able to select which style of cores runs either by software or by burning one-time fuses. So it’s not a quad core chip, but rather your choice of two different dual cores. Wild!

Raspberry Pi is also making a big deal about the new Arm TrustZone functionality. It has signed boot, 8 kB of OTP key-storage memory, SHA-256 acceleration, a hardware RNG, and “fast glitch detectors”. While this is probably more aimed at industry than at the beginning hacker, we’re absolutely confident that some of you out there will put this data-safe to good use.

There is, as of yet, no wireless built in. We can’t see into the future, but we can see into the past, and we remember that the original Pico was wireless for a few months before they got the WiFi and Bluetooth radio added into the Pico W. Will history repeat itself with the Pico 2?

We’re getting our hands on a Pico 2 in short order, and we’ve already gotten a sneak peek at the extensive software toolchain that’s been built out for it. All the usual suspects are there: Picotool, TinyUSB, and OpenOCD as we write this. We’ll be putting it through its paces and writing up all the details next week.

You Can Program AVRs From The Commodore 64

July 26, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

These days, most of our microcontroller boards come with bootloaders so you can squirt hex into them straight over USB. However, you don’t need to do things this way. If you’re more old school, you can program your AVRs right from a Commodore 64. [Linus Akesson] shows us how.

Programming an AVR isn’t that hard. By holding the chip in reset, it’s possible to flash code via a serial protocol using just three wires. However, that’s pretty impractical to do with modern PCs — they don’t come with addressable IO pins anymore. Normally, you’d use a dedicated programmer to do the job, but [Linus] found his had died on a Friday night. So he set about turning his C64 into one instead.

He decided to use the pins of the C64’s Joystick Port 2, with pins 1, 2, 3, and 4 hooked up to SCK, MOSI, Reset, and MISO on the AVR, respectively. 5 V and Ground were also provided courtesy of the C64’s port. He then whipped up a simple bit of assembly code to read a bit of AVR hex and spit it out over the Joystick port following the in-circuit programming protocol. With a 1541 Ultimate to load files on to the C64 in hand, it was easy to pull his compiled AVR program off his modern PC, chuck it on the C64, and then get the old Commodore to program the AVR in turn.

It’s not the first time [Linus] has wowed us with a C64 in hand. If you’ve got your own fresh projects for the best-selling computer of all time, don’t hesitate to let us know!

You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too

July 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 63 Comments

LEDs are a wonderful technology. You put in a little bit of power, and you get out a wonderful amount of light. They’re efficient, cheap, and plentiful. We use them for so much!

What you might not have known is that these humble components have a secret feature, one largely undocumented in the datasheets. You can use an LED as a light source, sure, but did you know you can use one as a sensor?

Continue reading “You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too” →

Time’s Up For Mbed

July 16, 2024 by Jenny List 18 Comments

In a forum post has come the announcement that mBed, ARM’s accessible microcontroller development platform, is to reach end-of-life in July 2026. This means that the online platform and OS will no longer be supported by ARM, though the latter will remain an open source project. The website will be shuttered, and no new projects can be created after that date using ARM infrastructure.

mBed was originally launched back in 2009, as a competitor to the Arduino IDE for ARM’s chips. Its easy development made it attractive and there were soon an array of boards from different manufacturers supporting it, but perhaps due to its support for only the one architecture, it failed to find success. It’s certainly not the first time a single-architecture microcontroller development platform has been discontinued, we need only look to the Intel Edison for that, but given the success of ARM platforms in general it’s still something of a surprise. Perhaps it’s time to take the press release explanation that other platforms such as Arduino have simply been much more popular.

Will a community form around an open source mBed? Given that it’s been a definite minority among Hackaday projects over the years, while we hope it does, we’re not so sure.

mBed board image: Viswesr, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Embedded Python: MicroPython Is Amazing

July 11, 2024 by Arya Voronova 105 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, about a month ago MicroPython has celebrated its 11th birthday. I was lucky that I was able to start hacking with it soon after pyboards have shipped – the first tech talk I remember giving was about MicroPython, and that talk was how I got into the hackerspace I subsequently spent years in. Since then, MicroPython been a staple in my projects, workshops, and hacking forays.

If you’re friends with Python or you’re willing to learn, you might just enjoy it a lot too. What’s more, MicroPython is an invaluable addition to a hacker’s toolkit, and I’d like to show you why. Continue reading “Embedded Python: MicroPython Is Amazing” →