Release of my Vacuum Tube Watch “EVERGLOW” v2.1
The Vacuum Tube Watch project is now released in version V2.1 “EVERGLOW”. Go see it via the “Projects” menu above. Enjoy!
ATtiny’s UPDI interface activates permanently upon noise input!?
UPDI – Unified Program and Debug Interface – is the new programming and debugging interface on new ATtiny MCUs from Microchip. The UPDI requires just a single pin on the MCU, so it is very suitable for low-pin count chips.… Continue Reading
Inexpensive Adafruit SMT Breakout boards (SOIC, TSSOP, MSOP) from a PCB Panel
I created a smal 100x100mm PCB mini-panel of some of the SMT breakout boards from Adafruit. Each mini-panel contains: 3x SOIC-20 (A-side) and TSSOP-20 (B-side) 5x SOIC-16 (A-side) and TSSOP-16 (B-side) 5x SOIC-8 (A-side) and MSOP-8 (B-side) 4x SOIC-8 (A-side)… Continue Reading
Release of the DIY Curve Tracer Project
Here you can find documentation about my DIY Analog Curve Tracer.
Cheap AVR UPDI Programmer from ATtiny817 Xplained Mini
New AVR processors from Microchip/Atmel use a 1-wire UPDI interface for flash programming. You could use either AVR ICE or Pickit 4 as the “official” programmers (I did not test any of them). Both of these cost >50 EUR. A… Continue Reading
PN7120 won’t not respond on the I2C bus unless CORE_RESET_CMD is sent in <1sec after power-up
NXP’s PN7120 is NFC controller for contactless communication at 13.56MHz. It interfaces with the host CPU via the I2C bus. The I2C slave address of PN7120 is 0b010100Lx, where L is a configurable LSB of the address (by pin B2,… Continue Reading
The Tale of a GCC Upgrade
Once upon a time, I decided it is a good time to upgrade the version of gcc compiler we use in our ARM926-based firmware project. Historically, this project uses gcc version 4.6, which is quite outdated nowadays (January 2018). In… Continue Reading
Did you know: Unaligned accesses in ARM
The X86 has always supported unaligned accesses. In the ARM world the first architecture that supported unaligned accesses in hardware was ARMv6. The architecture was implemented in the ARM11 core around the year 2002 and onward. There is an excellent… Continue Reading
Connecting MCU and FPGA at 100Mbit/s Using Ethernet RMII [Part 2]
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on Ethernet RMII. In Part 1 I described my hardware setup and basic Ethernet operation. In the second and final part I will describe the design of specialized MAC cores I implemented… Continue Reading
Connecting MCU and FPGA at 100Mbit/s Using Ethernet RMII [Part 1]
This is Part 1 of the two-part series on Ethernet RMII. Part 2 is also available. Imagine your application requires a non-standard periphery controlled by an embedded processor. What options do you have? The periphery can be implemented in an… Continue Reading