UEFI secure booting has been on the minds of many hackers and open sources advocates. Some believe that it will lock out certain operating systems in favor of vendor’s proprietary systems. (There have even been recent reports of bricking Samsung … Read more
This week we received a batch of PCBs and amongst them was the latest revision of our USB TFT breakoutboard. This board is the first board that features a new ICSP footprint, which occupies less space on the PCB and … Read more
One-bit ADC? Using a single flip-flop Jeri Ellsworth explains the principle behind ADC. This represents a simplified version of Delta-Sigma modulation.
Raj made a temperature and relative humidity meter to demonstrate adaptive brightness control on a seven segment LCD. The system uses a LDR light sensor in a closed loop to continuously adjust the brightness of the LEDs. The objective of … Read more
Kanal von MegaOscarVideos from Germany presents a two-part video comparision of the Funcube dongle and a RTL-SDR DVB-T dongle, in this case a Hama Nano version. The two devices are connected to the same antenna and using identical test systems … Read more
Kenneth compares the RC oscillator found on the ATMeg328 against an external quartz crystal. As expected there is a huge difference in precision and stability between the two. This really demonstrates how both oscillators, but particularly the internal one, are … Read more
Chris Marion has developed an impressive and dangerous project: FireHero. It uses a complex propane system and some electric valves coupled to an Arduino controller that hooks directly into a “guitar” – a Guitar Hero input device, hence the project … Read more
Here is an article from IKALOGIC describing how to implement CMOS cameras as sensors in 8bit microcontrollers. Processing color video in real time requires powerful DSPs or MCUs, but by downgrading the image to gray-scale, and using a lower resolution, … Read more
PLAYterm is a site dedicated to storing, replaying, and sharing terminal logs. When replaying your session, the code is read line by line, thus providing a more intuitive way of reviewing your logs. PLAYTERM is intended to raise the skills … Read more
Skot built a huge display made of many 7-Segment displays that can display animation. It’s driven via an FPGA board.
This video from OSCON, the Open Source Convention, features Alasdair Allen demonstrating the use of Maker Shed’s RedPark Breakout Pack for Arduino and iOS. This demo the Redpark Serial Cable for iOS, which is an Apple-approved cable for connecting your … Read more
Paul made a controller for the Flight Sim airplane simulator. He used the Teensyduino to connect various input and output peripherals to the famous Sim. He goes into detail on how he programed his board, and he also provided all … Read more
This week is dedicated to Bus Pirate development. Today we hacked the Bus Pirate to do crude capacitor measurement. You could use any microcontroller to do this, but one nice thing about the PIC24FJ is that it has a 32bit … Read more
NBitWonder writes: Over at NBitWonder, we have been working to develop a software-defined radio for a few months. Last weekend, the radio received its very first signals. There is a short writeup and demonstration video at our website. This is … Read more
You’ve probably seen aerial surveillance drones. You also probably know that GSM towers can be spoofed to fool unsuspecting users into connecting and having their phone security compromised. Well at this year’s Blackhat conference recently held in Las Vegas, security … Read more
Have a new component that’s not pin compatible with a breadboard? Chris from Pyroelectro has a new tutorial describing how to make your own custom PCB breakout boards. In this video he demonstrates how to build a board for an … Read more
Cellphones have been getting lighter and smaller with each new release. If researchers at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada have their way, the next gen phones will be paper thin. They recently unveiled the prototype of their “paperphone”, a smartphone … Read more
Nanode is a low cost Arduino-like sensor node board intended for web connectivity applications. It allows you to develop web based sensor and control systems – giving you web access to six analogue sensor lines and six digital I/O lines. … Read more
The term UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) is the technical term for the good old serial port found on most MCUs. The term USART similarly refers to a serial port capable of handling both synchronous and asynchronous operation. Over the … Read more
What’s in a name? David L. Jones of EEVBlog thinks he’s found an Easter egg in the performance characteristics of the 555 timer chip which reveals the basis of the “555″ in its name. Build his circuit (schematic at video … Read more
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