The new RP2040 chip by RaspberryPi is amazing. When we got our hands on this beautiful little thing, we did what we always do with new chips and slapped on a Goldfish; our favourite acid bassline synthesizer (we make fish and chips hahahaha). While benchmarking the performance by copy/pasting instances Read more
Since the last post I spent quite some time with my new tool to dump sequences from my commercial debugger. After comparing these dumps to various codebases I found online (libswd, cmsis-dap, mchck) and comparing them to the various manuals on the subject, I managed to extract the command sets Read more
One of the great breakthroughs of the Arduino has been that to get started, you only need the device itself and the software. The try/fail/try again cycle of development got reduced to altering your code and pressing run (again). Most other platforms completely fail in this respect. Many chip-manufacturers have excellent Read more
by Krzysztof Foltman After the initial success with LPC810, I was ready to work on something with more memory and more I/O. Searching the Farnell catalogue for simple, low-cost and hobbyist-friendly MCUs, I found the tiny STM32F030F4P6 microcontroller made by ST Microelectronics. The microcontroller The chip is based on an Read more
by Krzysztof Foltman This is my first successful attempt to do something with a 32-bit microprocessor in a circuit of my own making, instead of relying on commercially-available development boards. After some prior unsuccessful tries using STM32F051 and TQFP64 to DIP breakout boards, I decided to start over with something easier. Something that Read more
It has been quite a while since I had a chance to work on the tool – I have been too busy validating the output and playing with the microgameboy, but finally I’ve had the time to incorporate some bugfixes. The biggest one on the list has been the import Read more
The recent DirtyPCBs.com paneling experiment resulted in a nice new addition to our prototyping toolbox: the yellow panel. The yellow panel contains: Wolfsom SMT microphone breakout with small amplifier QFN24-to-dip adapter Freescale K20 TFT backpack (enhanced Teensy3.1 without the bootloaderchip) Freescale KL02Z DIP breakout with microphone USB-testpoint board in USBstick form Read more
DirtyPCB seems to be the first small-prototyping-service that allows you to build panels with breaktabs. I had to try this! Soon after this thought I stumbled upon the great question of “how” – here I had all these folders full of gerberfiles for boards.. but the tools to panelize them Read more
I like decorating PCBs. After I’ve spent ages designing and routing a schematic, I want it to look nice. Sadly – this is very badly supported by most CAD software dealing with circuit boards. Some vector art import tools exist, but they are all very far removed from an ideal Read more
After some major drama in the workshop (leakages, iron dust cloud, broken floor, rainwater coming in, etc) I finally have some time to share a few progress pictures. First and foremost: IT WORKS! The Goldfish R4 UI board can be used as a stand alone USB-MIDI controller! I had to Read more