Author Archives: the machinegeek

Shooting arcade game using CPLD

Here’s a video of Jeri Ellsworth’s latest project for element14, a shooting arcade game using the MachXO2 CPLD. During the design phase, she drew inspiration from various sources, including the dynamic logic found in UK horse racing betting sites, which helped her fine-tune the game’s real-time responsiveness. The game is simple in principle: use an […]

S/PDIF Digital Audio on the Parallax Propeller

Beth from scanlime has posted a detailed explanation of her development of an S/PDIF encoder object for the Parallax Propeller. The source code is open under an MIT-style license. If you’re a Propeller enthusiast it should be easy to implement this code to give your next sound project a digital output. Beth hopes that this […]

Max V CPLD development kit

The Altera Max V Development Kit is designed around the MAX V CPLD (5M570Z, 256-pin FBGA, -5 speed). The board features two general-purpose 2×20-pin 0.1-inch expansion headers, a 4-pin PC speaker header, two 6-pin motor control headers, a Type B USB connector (power source and communication port) with cable. The board has footprints for the […]

QTouch library for Atmel MCUs

The Atmel QTouch Library is a royalty-free software library (GCC and IAR™) for developing touch applications on standard Atmel AT91SAM and AVR microcontrollers. Developers can use it to integrate touch-sensing capability into their applications by linking the library into firmware. The library can be used to develop single-chip solutions for many control applications or to […]

Logic Sniffer used in IDE bus sniffing and hard drive password recovery

Open Sesame on Prezi dop3j0e needed a way to recover the password on his ThinkPad’s hard drive after the laptop’s fingerprint scanner died (in which the password was stored.) Luckily, the drive’s IDE had 16 5V data lines just like the inputs on the OpenBench Logic Sniffer. He wired the Logic Sniffer to the lines […]

What does a $7,500 dev kit look like?

We’re all familiar with CPLD and FPGA. Now Tabula, Inc., has debuted their line of 3PLD chips. Known as the ABAX product family and presently targeted primarily at communications equipment vendors, the chips are said to employ an innovative architecture called Spacetime that enables the devices to achieve superior density and capability for logic, memory, […]

Verizon 2011 data breach report

Verizon has released their 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report, a 74 page PDF cataloging the various type of cyber attacks they encountered in 2010. It resulted from a study conducted by the Verizon RISK Team with cooperation from the U.S. Secret Service and the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit. Despite the cool cover, it’s mostly […]

Arduino shower time analyzer

Paul Asselin says: I wanted to know how much time I was spending under the shower each day, especially in these environmentally conscious times. The benefits of that are that I can perhaps save some money on the water bills and also study the effect of temperature on my showering time.  So Paul designed this […]

MachXO2 Pico Development Kit promo

Remember the Lattice MachXO2 PLD we mentioned back in December? Well the MachXO2 Pico Development Kits are now available from Lattice Semi! The MachXO2 Pico Development Kit features the MachXO2 LCMXO2-1200ZE device, 1 Mbit SPI Flash, I2C temperature sensor, an expansion header for JTAG, SPI, I2C and GPIO interfaces, an LCD display and capacitive touch […]

Amicus18 prototype board

Amicus18 is a multifunction development system inspired by the popular Arduino board. Its based on the Microchip PIC® 18F25K20 running at 16 MHz supplemented by a FT232RL USB-to-serial chip and a LMV358. Full documentation is available, as well as a free Proton BASIC Compiler, which is based on Crownhill’s Proton BASIC Compiler. The bootloader source […]

Dayton Hamvention May 20-22, 2011

The 60th annual Dayton Hamvention, a three-day amateur radio, computer and technology gathering is set this year for May 20-22, 2011, at the Dayton Hara Arena, 1001 Shiloh Springs Road, Dayton, OH 45415. Dozens of commercial radio and electronics vendors as well as numerous individual flea market vendors will be in attendance. While this is […]

The Ghazala Thereglyph: radiopool synthesizer

Reed Ghazala, author of Circuit-Bending : Build Your Own Alien Instrument has released his latest creation: The Ghazala Thereglyph. He writes: The Thereglyph is a “radiopool” instrument, my term for a radio-sensitive instrument meant to be placed within the RF ‘pool’ of an outside source. Like the theremin, pitch and volume can be adjusted without […]

How cops hack your cellphone in 90 seconds

You may have seen reports in the media recently, such as this MSNBC report highlighting the practice by police of extracting data from the cellphones of innocent civilians. While we’re not going to discuss the political or legal aspects of this practice, from a hacker perspective it’s interesting to know what type of tools and […]

Arduino sinewave generator

labIII, the Laboratory for Experimental Computer Science at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, posted this tutorial on how to generate sine waves with an Arduino using the Direct Digital Synthesis method. They explain: Here we describe how to generate sine waves with an Arduino board in a very accurate way. Almost no additional hardware […]

Avnet Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard

In a recent comment, Zooboo informed us of the Spartan®-6 FPGA LX9 MicroBoard. Produced as a joint venture between Xilinx and Avnet, the MicroBoard includes a Spartan-6 XC6SLX9-2CSG324C FPGA, 64 MB LPDDR SDRAM, 128 Mb Multi-I/O SPI Flash, 10/100 Ethernet PHY, USB-to-UART port, on-board USB, JTAG circuitry, single-chip 3-rail power with Power Good indicator. It’s […]