#PDF about the #history of #8051 #microcontrollers
on 02026-09-18Apparently #Arduino ATMega328 #AVR #microcontrollers can sample at 38ksps if you set the ADC clock divider to 32 (16MHz ÷ 32 = 500kHz, and then you need 14 clocks per sample), and still have an ENOB of about 9.5. Not exactly high #precision #electronics but often adequate. And if you’re willing to accept more noise you can do 76ksps with an ENOB of about 8.7. Higher sample rates produce audible clicks when used for audio.
on 02026-09-09#video #toread about #CH32V003 #microcontrollers. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-22Dmitry Grinberg designed an SBC with an #STM32 (STM32G030) that can run Linux at an interactively usable speed with just three 8-pin chips: the μC, an SPI PSRAM, and a USB-to-serial chip. Also some resistors and caps. #hardware #electronics #microcontrollers
on 02026-06-12#CNLohr’s program #dyngraph using #rawdraw for visualizing real-time waveforms reported by #microcontrollers. #electronics
on 02026-06-02#CNLohr has new #CH32V006 porn on his channel, featuring its supposedly 1.7Msps ADC in a TDR use case. Apparently its DMA can schedule future I/Os, apparently even to memory-mapped I/O addresses, and you can control the timing of ADC samples to within a single 48MHz CPU clock cycle, although you can’t sample at 48Msps. The ADC is astonishingly clear, especially when he uses an external quartz crystal to get more precise sample times; the code works on the #CH32V003 ADC but has worse precision, but the ’006 has a problem lacking on the ’003 — a discontinuity in the count at multiples of 512 (large DNL?). Oh and apparently UIAPduino SBCs powered by a CH32V006 are available for ¥290 in Tokyo vending machines? Which also sell Raspberry Pi Pico 2s for ¥1060‽ And, holy shit, he can actually very clearly visualize the reflections back and forth from a roll of coax cable with the opposite end open-circuited. He plots it with debug printfs and his "dyngraph" program. #video #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-02#video on #speech-synthesis from an 8-pin #CH32V003, driving a speaker through a transistor, using 2-bit ADPCM and the Talkie #LPC speech synthesis library. #electronics #microcontrollers #hardware
on 02026-05-24#EEVblog #video on #CH32V003 #microcontrollers, documenting his half-hour to get the thing up and running, in January 02023, when it only cost 10¢. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-24SPL130A 6502 #microcontrollers datasheet #PDF from “OCT. 04, 2001”, the one used in the Fisher Price Pixter. The first version was from 01999.
on 02026-05-14#Dmitry Grinberg reverse-engineered the Fisher-Price Pixter and found that its game cartridges were full of code for a Forth-like 16-bit stack machine. Apparently the Pixter Color he started with was an ARM, but the Pixter Classic was a 6502, probably from the Chinese 6502 vendor Sunplus/Generalplus. “Fair, there are some old cores commonly used today in cheap places, like the i-wish-it-would-already-die-but-it-will-outlive-me shitshow that is the 8051, but this is the first I’ve seen of a modern tapeout of a 6502.” This writeup also has a good explanation of how resistive touchscreen #hardware works. #microcontrollers #electronics #reverse-engineering #archival
on 02026-05-14#Contiki NG is a continuation of Contiki for #microcontrollers mostly, but only the big ones
on 02026-05-11#Contiki already ran on #AVR #microcontrollers in 02004 and supported #VNC on them.
on 02026-05-11discussion of embedded #Rust and its embedded OS "Ariel" on #microcontrollers. Lots of useful information about Rust stability commitments, etc.
on 02026-05-04#cpldcpu decapped CH32V203 #hardware and found a separate NOR flash die in the package with the #microcontrollers. #reverse-engineering #electronics #toread
on 02026-04-29#cpldcpu got 99.5% MNIST accuracy with variable quantization and depthwise separable convolution on a CH32V002, a newer, smaller #RISC-V #CH32V003 with multiplier #hardware. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware #neural-networks #toread
on 02026-04-29#Smoothieboard #hardware had showstopper supply-chain problems in late 02020 because of the #COVID shortages of #microcontrollers, which is how they ended up switching from LPCxxxx to #STM32. #history
on 02026-04-12#Mecrisp puppeting #MSP430 #microcontrollers over #JTAG to test your #Forth with access to peripherals without installing Forth on them, then cross-compiling and installing firmware on it that doesn't include the interactive Forth REPL. #hardware #electronics
on 02026-04-12#Mecrisp Stellaris #Forth apparently has pretty good support for #STM32 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-12#video by "Dr. Roger Billings" about the #history of TMS 1802 #microcontrollers that’s 100% talking-head filler and stock photos. #plonk
on 02026-03-15#CH32V003 #microcontrollers #bitbanging low-speed #USB by #CNLohr. “The bootloader version of the tool can create a HID device, enumerate and allow execution of code on-device in 1,920 bytes of code. Basic HID setups are approximately 2kB, like the Joystick demo.”
on 02025-11-11using #CH32V003 #microcontrollers for debugging connections to #ARM #electronics #hardware (alternative to ST-Link or J-Link) obtained by #hoarding disposable vapes. The protocol is CoreSight DAP (Debug Access Probe) over SWD, also implemented by CMSIS-DAP, DAPLink, or free-dap.
on 02025-11-11running Windows 95 and Linux on #ESP32 (S3) #microcontrollers through 80386 #emulation with He Chunhui’s "Tiny386" and SeaBIOS. #retrocomputing
on 02025-11-11#speech on #CH32V003 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware using #Talkie
on 02025-11-05#video #toread of “10¢” #electronics #hardware for making #music with #CH32V003 #microcontrollers
on 02025-10-21Almost cheapest #microcontrollers #pricing on LCSC: NY8A054ES8, a SOP-8, for 3.91¢ in quantity 1000. This is from JSMSEMI (Shenzhen JSMicro Semiconductor Co., Ltd.) 1T 8-bit 8MHz chip, 128 bytes RAM, 2k × 14-bit EPROM program memory (but no quartz window, so one-time programmable). 8-level hardware stack. The datasheet is full of descriptions of peripheral registers and pin circuit schematics, and then the 55-instruction instruction set is documented on pp. 76–91.
on 02025-10-14Currently cheapest #microcontrollers #pricing on LCSC: PMS150G-U06 (a SOT-23-6) for 2.02¢ in quantity 3000. #Padauk has broken the 3¢ barrier! One-time programmable. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-14#Bluepill #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware diagnostic guide for use with #Mecrisp #Forth.
on 02025-09-30you can set up DMA on #STM32 #microcontrollers such as the STM32F407VG to write data to a GPIO port controlled by a timer; to enable DMA on timer 1 rollover, you select channel 6 on stream 5 on DMA 2 with DMA2_Stream5->CR = (6u << DMA_SxCR_CHSEL_Pos) | stuff and tell the timer to generate a DMA signal on timer overflow with TIM1->DIER = TIM_DIER_UDE.
#video by "simonmartin_ch" of how you can get #STM32 #microcontrollers such as an STM32f103rb running at 64MHz to DMA data from memory to a GPIO at 2MHz using a timer. Using STM32Cube tho. He sets bit 8 (UDE he says) in TIM2->DIER to make TIM2 generate DMA requests repeatedly. Also he’s using the TIM2 output compare signal itself as one of his output signals and using circular DMA mode. He says at 4MHz you get a lot of jitter, even with “High” priority (visible from 3’25"). A commenter “synergie8” warns that on STM32F2 and STM32F4 DMA1 can’t be used with GPIO, so you have to use DMA2 and consequently TIM1 or TIM8.
on 02025-08-13you can get #STM32 #microcontrollers such as an STM32f103rb running at 64MHz to DMA data from memory to a GPIO at 2MHz using a timer
on 02025-08-13#PDF #appnote on #STM32 #microcontrollers: many of the line (but not STM32F) support DMA multiplexing
on 02025-08-13Setting up STM32F407VG #microcontrollers to DMA data from a memory buffer to a GPIO port
on 02025-08-13#video from 02023 by Michael Hill (#bitfixer) of his "esp32s3vga" library, not really bitbanging VGA signals on ESP32-S3 #microcontrollers for a “new retro computer”, simulating an 8-bit CPU with 8 megs of SPI RAM. Actually it includes an RGB LCD driver peripheral that’s perfect for this, which can even use external PSRAM; he’s using a 25MHz dot clock with 640×480 because 25.175MHz wasn't stable, and 40MHz for 800×600. There’s a demo of playing 3-bit-per-pixel and 8-bit-per-pixel (R 3, G 3, B 2) video from an SD card in SPI mode. #retrocomputing
on 02025-08-13#Bitluni #video on how ESP32 #microcontrollers can #bitbang #NTSC and PAL color, including YUV equations, etc.
on 02025-08-13#video by #Bitluni of #bitbang #NTSC and PAL video signals from ESP32 #microcontrollers using I²S. Waveform animations showing the h-sync pulse, etc. Recommends watching CNLohr’s videos for color.
on 02025-08-13Mecrisp-Stellaris #Forth for #MSP430 #microcontrollers now has #LSP support for your IDE.
on 02025-08-06using #Padauk PMS150C #microcontrollers to handle reset sequencing for Ethernet #electronics
on 02025-06-21getting 90.07% on downscaled MNIST on #Padauk PMS150C #microcontrollers, using 1696 2-bit weights decoded to {-2, -1, 1, 2}. #electronics #neural-networks
on 02025-06-21IDE for #8051 #microcontrollers including a simulator
on 02025-05-22#FreeRTOS runs on some #8051 #microcontrollers
on 02025-05-2295¢ #8051 #microcontrollers with 800ksps 10-bit ADC (or 12-bit at 200ksps), plus two analog comparators, USB, 700pJ/insn, 8K flash, 2.3K SRAM, 13 5V-tolerant GPIOs. #electronics #hardware #pricing
on 02025-05-22200 billion #ARM chips, mostly #microcontrollers, had been shipped as of 02021; 1 billion as of 02022, and 1 billion a year in 02011. At the time of the article (02021-10-18) they were shipping 900 per second, which is about a billion every two weeks.
on 02025-03-28archive page on comparison of the Apollo Guidance Computer with an Anker charger whose CPU has 563 times the #performance of the #AGC #microcontrollers #electronics
on 02025-03-28"Erratum 9" for #Raspberry-Pi #RP2350 #electronics results in 120μA of persistent leakage current under certain circumstances. #microcontrollers #facepalm
on 02025-03-28#LCSC #pricing for 16-pin #CH32V003 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware: 14.21¢ in quantity 500. Not the cheapest, but it’s a RISC-V with IIRC an on-board op-amp, though the linked datasheet only covers the CPU really.
on 02025-03-16#LCSC #pricing for 14-pin #PY32 #ARM #microcontrollers #hardware, 9.01¢ in quantity 500. Not the cheapest, but it’s an ARM. #electronics
on 02025-03-16#news on #microcontrollers: this Cortex-M0 from TI is a WLCSP-8 and has 1KiB of SRAM. It’s not really in the running for being cheapest at 20¢.
on 02025-03-13#video of #Bitluni making a laser vector display with some laser galvos driven from an #ESP32, burning out a lot of hardware in the process. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02025-03-04#PDF English #datasheet for #Padauk PFS122 #microcontrollers which have a 12-bit ADC and 24MHz. Not quite the cheapest microcontroller but they only cost 4.32¢ in quantity 2000.
on 02025-02-08"Moddable" is a free-software #JS engine (ES2023) for #microcontrollers like ESP8266, ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, nRF52, etc. Its JS engine is called “XS”.
on 02024-12-27the PMS150G #datasheet #PDF (the 2¢ variant of the #Padauk #microcontrollers) #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-22#Padauk PMS150G support was added to #Free-PDK in 02021 after the chip came out in 02019. #microcontrollers
on 02024-11-22a #C++ library for using an #ESP32 as a #USB host. #microcontrollers
on 02024-11-20#ESP32 #microcontrollers can be #USB hosts for HID devices
on 02024-11-20#PDF #datasheet for PIC16F1829LIN #microcontrollers with #LINbus support
on 02024-10-28Apparently #Raspberry-Pi #RP2350 #microcontrollers have a bug where they draw about 100μA from their GPIOs in input mode when they’re close to ½Vcc, with some hysteresis. #hardware
on 02024-10-25Chuck McManis’s teardown of the Parallax BASIC Stamp #microcontrollers firmware, with its variable-bit-length instructions and operands.
on 02024-10-25#video on #3D-printing an #STM for #microscopy. This is a unimorph disc type made from a piezo buzzer; he ruined several before switching to ultra-fine magnet wires and low-temperature solder (ChipQuik?). His kinematic mount seems to consist of three bearing balls, one in a V-groove, one on a flat glass surface, and one in some kind of a pit, each adjustable with a knurled screw. He seems to have used heat-set inserts to build his frame out of 3-D printed plastic — although PLA has the best TCE of common plastics, he’s using PA-CF, carbon fiber reinforced nylon, which ought to be pretty stable in the X and Y dimensions, like wood. (He mentions that many STMs are made out of Zerodur or similar glass-ceramic #materials.) Printed on a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon. The voiceover might be an AI reading a script because it mispronounces a lot of words and sometimes gets the prosody of sentences wrong, despite having a bog-standard GA accent. He put metal tape on the parts for EMI shielding; looks like aluminum flashing. To pre-amplify the nanoamps or picoamps signal from the tunneling current, he copied Dan Berard’s open-source STM preamp circuit, naturally using a current-to-voltage converter built around an op-amp, but I can’t tell which one. He shielded his cable to the probe and put the analog electronics in a Faraday cage to reduce EMI further, getting only about 10pA of noise. Berard’s #electronics design used an OPA124, but he says “The chips used in Dan’s design are hard to find these days.” When it comes to #microcontrollers #hardware, he’s using a Teensy 4.1. He’s using an aluminum plate and some rare-earth magnets to damp the oscillations of his stable platform. “This is the first atomic image captured by a 3-D printed scanning tunneling microscope.”
on 02024-09-28#ESP32 #microcontrollers have not very good ADCs, not good enough for music with DNL of ±7 counts and lots of noise, despite 12 bits of resolution at 200ksps
on 02024-09-24#Dr-Volt #video about converting an old Logitech mouse into a camera. It had a custom Logitech DIP on a single-sided PCB, separate from the ADNS 2610 camera sensor DIP, which has an 18×18 array of photodiodes visible under a microscope, with an “AGILENT 28D3D” label on the exposed die and a date of “2004”. Since he didn’t have a datasheet for the Logitech microcontroller, he hooked up the sensor chip to an #ESP32 S3 (programmed with #PlatformIO and VSCode) from his collection of #microcontrollers, like the one he’d built a laser scanning microscope from before. The chip uses an SPI-like protocol, but using a bidirectional data pin, and it exposes registers for not just Delta_X and Delta_Y but also some others including Pixel_Data, reads from which provide one pixel after another (so there’s no way to request a particular pixel). The mouse’s native resolution seems like a decent monochrome microscope, but with a very small field of view. He was able to get about a 3fps frame, unsurprising for what’s basically a debugging feature. He grafted the ESP32 into the mouse. #hoarding #electronics #hardware
Frank Sergeant’s 01991 paper, “A 3-Instruction #Forth for Embedded Systems Work: Illustrated on the Motorola MC68HC11” #microcontrollers
on 02024-09-10#EEVBlog forum thread about #Padauk #microcontrollers #hardware #electronics
on 02024-09-07#Padauk and other super cheap #microcontrollers (Holtek, etc.) #electronics
on 02024-09-07#Padauk #microcontrollers #hardware overclocked to drive WS2812s #electronics
on 02024-09-07#8051 #microcontrollers #datasheet #hardware #PDF
on 02024-09-01#video #toread about 8-bit #microcontrollers becoming obsolete, from the guy who explained how you can reuse 8051s. Or, rather, he claims that components can’t become obsolete. “Has anybody in their right mind ever said that 74-series logic is obsolete?” Yes, I think so, use a CPLD. Video quality is not good. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-31#Raspberry-Pi RP2350 #microcontrollers review by #Dmitry Grinberg #electronics
on 02024-08-27#video by #GreatScott from two years ago endorsing the #Raspberry-Pi RP2040 Pico #microcontrollers #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a 240-megahertz Renesas RX72N with 4 mebibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for US$20.85 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a 600-megahertz Cortex-M7 using external program memory and a mebibyte of ram for US$14.48 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a dual-core 150-megahertz Cortex-M0+ with 2 mebibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for US$12.92 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a 480-megahertz Cortex-M7 with 128 kibibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for us$11.27 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27#LCSC #pricing for #CH32V003 #electronics #hardware is 12.45¢ in quantity 500. These are #RISC-V #microcontrollers
on 02024-08-27#PDF from 02019 by James Brakefield listing mostly open-source #microcontrollers #gateware on #OpenCores, including a bunch of #6502 designs, an RCA 1802 or two, some Motorola 6801 clones, a bunch of #8051 clones, several #8080 designs (including one by C.H. Ting!), several #68000 designs, several #68HC11 designs, several ARMs (which are not all proprietary), some #AVR designs, a lot of #Forth chips, a PDP-1, a bunch of MIPS designs, an MMIX, various #OpenRISC 1000 designs, a PDP-10, a bunch of PDP-8s, a lot of PIC16s, a lot of #RISC-V designs, Cray-1 and Cray-2 clones, several Z80s, the #Reduceron, etc. There’s a table specifying how many LUTs each one achieves, how many KIPS per LUT (!), what they’re written in, how big their address spaces are, year started, year of last revision, etc.
on 02024-08-25bitbanging #DVI video #signals on #RP2040 #microcontrollers #hardware
on 02024-08-16new cheapest #microcontrollers: Cypress CY8C4045FNI-DS400T, 1.5¢ in quantity 1000. It purports to be a 48MHz Cortex-M0 ARM with 32KiB of Flash and 4KiB of SRAM in a 1.6mm x 2mm package, 0.31-0.37 mm thick, with nine GPIO pins. I think that’s 4000 Dhrystone MIPS per dollar. #electronics #hardware #pricing
on 02024-08-01#video of Nyquest 1.8¢ #microcontrollers with schematics for a vibrator and a hair curler. They demonstrate some EMI and ESD testing, using a cigarette lighter insead of an ESD gun for the ESD testing!
on 02024-07-17NY8A051 family of 1.8¢ #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02024-07-17#PDF #electronics #hardware #datasheet for NY8A051H 1.8¢ #microcontrollers.
on 02024-07-17#video of Iran’s #Shahed 136 kamikaze drone servomotor. It uses an #STM32 with six power MOSFETs to control a brushless motor and read from an encoder; these motors sell for €20 in Ukraine. There’s a silicone conformal coating to protect the board. It uses a conventional 600μs–2.4ms PWM control signal. Interesting reverse-polarity protection circuit on the ground rail. Detailed schematic analysis, awesome. #electronics #hardware #microcontrollers #flying #weaponry #Le-labo-de-Michel
on 02024-06-26Chuck McManis’s introduction to #PIC #microcontrollers
on 02024-05-12#Nyquest #PDF #datasheet for 1.58¢ #microcontrollers. Sounds like a #PIC 12F or 16F. 14-bit instruction words, GOTO instruction, INDF magic indirect addressing register, 55 “powerful” instructions, bit test and skip for control flow, flags named Z and C and DC (for decimal carry), one-address instruction format with an accumulator. The NY8A050 version has 32 bytes of RAM and 512 instructions of program, the 051 has 48 and 1024.
on 02024-05-12#JLCPCB has new cheapest #microcontrollers: #Nyquest NY8A051H: 1.58¢ each in quantity 20000, or 3.2¢ in quantity 1 #hardware #pricing
on 02024-05-12#video about improved #mechanical servomotors for hobby robotics. He’s using an SPI magnetic encoder with on-chip sensors to read the motor position, controlled with an #STM32 G0 interfaced via I²C, programmed in Rust, which controls an LV8548 H-bridge driver chip, which can handle 12V 2A output. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02024-04-28#video from 02015 by "fullspectrumtechnician3798" on salvaging #microcontrollers for #hardware #electronics projects. Socketed DIPs are easiest to remove from the equipment. Old computer printer boards are one of his examples; he exhibits one with an UV-erasable 8748, which you can also “enable the external access” (I think this is pulling the EA pin high, maybe pin 7) to make it run a program from external ROM/RAM. He also exhibits what looks like a Packard Bell full-length ISA hard drive controller, saying, “normal Winchester drive controllers, pretty much all of them will have either an 8048 or 49 or 8051, usually...labeled, like, Winchester, something like WD1015.” He demonstrates one thus salvaged and hooked up to an external EPROM. Then he exhibits a full-height 5¼ IDE hard drive, saying they usually have an 8051, but this time he’s pointing to something like a PLCC. Then he exhibits an ISA modem card, which he says pretty much always has a microcontroller. He says the Winbond 78C31B on that modem is an 8051 (and therefore also has EA). “Some network cards like this old [ISA] LANTastic have a Zigalog Z80... luckily the serial chip, the RAM, and the CPU are all socketed.” Then he exhibits an old (01980s) UPS control board with a Philips 87C52E socketed DIP, which is another 8051. He says the MC6800 series is also useful even if preprogrammed, by using the “special functions” pins (?) to “tell them to boot off of an external ROM”. Though the one he shows is UV-erasable. Holding up a PLCC chip, he says hard drives, especially Western Digital, use the Intel 80C196 style, which is 16-bit but still has the “external access” pin. And he says keyboards often use the NEC D8048-8C, which is of course an 8048. #bootstrapping #hoarding #video #scouting
on 02024-04-05