Open World 3D Game Runs On The RP2040 Microcontroller

December 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The Raspberry Pi RP2040 is versatile and cheap, but it’s by no means known as the most powerful microcontroller on the world. Regardless, it is capable of great things, as demonstrated by [Bernhard Strobl], who built a 3D open world game engine that runs on that very platform.

The graphics are simple, but with a compelling low-poly style.

The game engine itself is built to run on the Pimoroni PicoSystem, which is essentially a handheld gaming platform built around the RP2040 chip. The engine takes advantage of the multi-core nature of the RP2040, using the second core as a dedicated rasterizer to keep frames pumping out.

The basic game [Bernhard] built in the engine features 50 NPC characters and 50 further zombies, all running at the same time. Specs are impressive, with the engine’s included game simulating a “world” of 120 x 120 meters in size. As a maximum limit, the engine can handle a 2.56 x 2.56 km world, thanks to the use of 8-bit integers for directional data. However, limited storage space would make it difficult to achieve such a large world in practice.

We don’t get to see much of the gameplay in the YouTube video, but the quality of the graphics is impressive for such a cheap microcontroller. It seems within the bounds of possibility that an actual open-world game could be practical on the PicoSystem if only enough storage were available. Video after the break.

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side by side, showing hardware experiments with capacitor gating through FETs, an initial revision of the modchip board with some fixes, and a newer, final, clean revision.

A Modchip To Root Starlink User Terminals Through Voltage Glitching

November 28, 2022 by Arya Voronova 37 Comments

A modchip is a small PCB that mounts directly on a larger board, tapping into points on that board to make it do something it wasn’t meant to do. We’ve typically seen modchips used with gaming consoles of yore, bypassing DRM protections in a way that a software hacks couldn’t quite do. As software complexity and therefore attack surface increased on newer consoles, software hacks have taken the stage. However, on more integrated pieces of hardware, we’ll still want to return to the old methods – and that’s what this modchip-based hack of a Starlink terminal brings us.

[Lennert Wouters]’ team has been poking and prodding at the Starlink User Terminal, trying to get root access, and needed to bypass the ARM Trusted Firmware boot-time integrity checks. The terminal’s PCB is satellite-dish-sized, so things like laser fault injection are hard to set up – hence, they went the voltage injection route. Much poking and prodding later, they developed a way to reliably glitch the CPU into verifying a faulty firmware, and got to a root shell – the journey described in a BlackHat talk embedded below. Continue reading “A Modchip To Root Starlink User Terminals Through Voltage Glitching” →

A Game Boy Advance – Downgraded!

November 21, 2022 by Jenny List 6 Comments

We feature a large number of game console mods here, because enhancing the experience of using a classic machine often involves some really clever work. But here’s one that’s a bit different, instead of upgrading his Game Boy Advance, [Wenting Zhang] has downgraded it from a colour screen to a monochrome LCD. Take a look at the video below the break.

One might ask why this would be necessary, given that there are plenty of backlit colour LCD upgrades already for the GBA, but perhaps people who played the original might understand that it’s about improving the viewability over the rather poor-quality colour LCD original.

Interesting too is the choice of display controller. Where it might be expected to find an FPGA, instead there’s an PR2040. He goes into detail about its programming, and we hope it might inspire any others looking at screen transplants. Meanwhile if the name [Wenting Zhang] means anything to you, it should be for his other work with mono LCDs.

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Is This The Smallest CP/M Machine Ever?

November 16, 2022 by Jenny List 22 Comments

If you had an office word processor in the late 1970s, the chances are it ran Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. IBM went for Microsoft in the 1980s and the once-dominant player fell on hard times, but it survives today as a popular choice on retrocomputer platforms. Even the more compact Z80 systems are a little large for 2022, so when [Kian Ryan] needed the ultimate in CP/M portability it fell on a more modern piece of silicon. Hence he’s put it on a tiny RP2040-based board from Pimoroni alongside an Adafruit micro SD card breakout.

The tiny hardware is neat of course, but the real star of the show is the software. Non-CP/M aficionados will be interested to learn about RunCPM, and for this project, RunCPM 2040. This provides an emulated environment on a host microcontroller to run CP/M, allowing the operating system to be hosted on easier hardware than some of the original machines.

All this makes for a tiny development machine, but perhaps of more interest would be a machine that’s all-in-one with a display and perhaps a keyboard. The RP2040 is interesting in this case because of those programmable state machines. Could it be made to run a video display alongside RunCPM? We hope someone has a go at writing it.

An RP2040 Powered Pick And Place

November 7, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 15 Comments

Pick and place machines are a wonder to behold, as they delicately and accurately place part after part. Unfortunately, they have to have a similarly wondrous price tag. Luckily, they aren’t too difficult to make yourself as they share many properties of a 3D printer with some extra constraints. [Stargirl Flowers] released Starfish, an open-source pick-and-place control board based around an RP2040 to help people make their own.

She purchased a LumenPnP, and the itch to tinker became too much to ignore. The STM32 on the stock controller also happened to get fried, leaving an obvious opening to create a custom board. [Stargirl] chose Trinamic TMC2209 motor controllers to drive the three stepper motors. The power circuit is impressively overbuilt with a 3A fuse, a TVS diode for shunting voltage spikes, a P-channel MOSFET for reverse polarity protection, a low-pass filter for AC ripple, and a large 100μF capacitor.

The RP2040 is a good choice since it’s easy to get and has plenty of digital I/O. USB connects the board to the outside work and includes ESD TVS diodes to protect the board when connecting and disconnecting the USB port. Motors for vacuums are controlled by a 74HC2G34 buffer that drives enable lines to two MOSFETs. Solenoids are similar but with a high current peak and a much smaller current to keep them open. The DRV120 fits the bill as it is a single-channel relay with current regulation. I2C vacuum sensors are the same ones on the Lumen motherboard; they just required an I2C multiplexer.

It’s an extremely well-documented project explaining why each part was chosen and why. If you want to create an RP2040 project that needs to last, we consider this a guiding star. It’s all up on GitHub for you to take a look at.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen RP2040 as part of a motor controller, and we suspect we’ll see more.

A Pi Pico plugged into a breadboard, with an I2C OLED display connected to it

Need An USB-I2C Adapter? Use Your Pico!

October 31, 2022 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

Given its abundance and simplicity, the RP2040 has no doubt become a favourite for USB peripheral building – in particular, USB-connected tools for electronics experiments. Today, we see one more addition to our Pico-based tool arsenal – a USB-I2C adapter firmware for RP2040 by [Renze Nicolai]. This is a reimplementation of the ATTiny-based I2C-Tiny-USB project and complies to the same protocol – thus, it’s compatible with the i2c-tiny-usb driver that’s been in the Linux kernel for ages. Just drag&drop the .uf2, run a script on your Linux system, and you will get a /dev/i2c-X device you can work with from userspace code, or attach other kernel drivers to.

The software will work with any RP2040 devboard – just connect your I2C devices to the defined pins and you’ll have them show up in i2cdetect output on your Linux workstation. As a demo, [Renze] has written a userspace Python driver for one of these SSD1306 128×64 OLEDs, and gives us a commandline that has the driver accept output of an ffmpeg command capturing your main display’s contents, duplicating your screen on the OLED – in a similar fashion that we’ve seen with the “HDMI” I2C-driven display a few months back. Everything you might need is available on the GitHub page, including usage instructions and examples, and the few scripts you can use if you want to add an udev rule or change the I2C clock frequency.

Just to name a few purposes, you can use a Pi Pico as a tool for SWD, JTAG, CAN, a logic analyser with both digital and analog channels, or even as a small EMP-driven chip glitching tool. The now-omnipresent $3 Pi Pico boards, it seems, are a serious contender to fondly remembered hacker tools of the past, such as the legendary BusPirate.

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Card's author typing on the IBM PC110's keyboard, with the Pico W-based card plugged into the PCMCIA slot on the left. PC110's screen shows successful ping 8.8.8.8.8.

Pi Pico W Does PCMCIA, Gets This IBM PC110 Online

September 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 37 Comments

Bringing modern connectivity to retro computers is an endearing field- with the simplicity of last-century hardware and software being a double-edged sword, often, you bring a powerful and tiny computer of modern age to help its great-grandparent interface with networks of today. [yyzkevin] shows us a PCMCIA WiFi card built using a Pi Pico W, talking ~~PCI~~ ISA. This card brings modern-day WiFi connectivity to his IBM PC110, without requiring a separate router set up for outdated standards that the typical PCMCIA WiFi cards are limited by.

The RP2040 is made to talk ~~PCI~~ ISA using, of course, the PIO engine. A CPLD helps with ~~PCI~~ ISA address decoding, some multiplexing, and level shifting between RP2040’s 3.3V and the PCI 5 V levels. The RP2040 software emulates a NE2000 network card, which means driver support is guaranteed on most OSes of old times, and the software integration seems seamless. The card already works for getting the PC110 online, and [yyzkevin] says he’d like to improve on it – shrink the design so that it resembles a typical PCMCIA WiFi card, tie some useful function into the Pico’s USB port, and perhaps integrate his PCMCIA SoundBlaster project into the whole package while at it.

This is a delightful project in how it achieves its goal, and a pleasant surprise for everyone who’s been observing RP2040’s PIO engine conquer interfaces typically unreachable for run-of-the-mill microcontrollers. We’ve seen Ethernet, CAN and DVI, along many others, and there’s undoubtedly more to come.