Over on YouTube [Electronic Wizard] explains how to use the AT24C32 EEPROM for external memory for microcontrollers. He begins by explaining that you don’t want to try modifying your microcontroller flash memory for storing settings, you want to use a separate EEPROM for that. Sometimes your microcontroller will have EEPROM memory attached, but you might […]
Building a simple 8-bit computer is a great way to understand computing fundamentals, but there’s only so much you can learn by building a system around an existing processor. If you want to learn more, you’ll have to go further and build the CPU yourself, as [MINT] demonstrated with his EPROMINT project (video in Polish, […]
The Enigma machine is perhaps one of the most legendary devices to come out of World War II. The Germans used the ingenious cryptographic device to hide their communications from the Allies, who in turn spent an incredible amount of time and energy in finding a way to break it. While the original Enigma was […]
[Starhawk] is a man with a problem. More accurately, he’s a man whose mother has a problem, but ultimately that ends up being the same thing. Her wide-format Canon printer recently stopped working after better than a decade of reliable service, and he wants to know why. Rather than spend the money on buying a […]
For whatever reason, the Video Graphics Array standard seems to attract a lot of hardware hacks. Most of them tend to center around tricking a microcontroller into generating the signals needed to send images to a VGA monitor. We love those hacks, but this one takes a different tack – a microcontroller-free VGA display that […]
There are plenty of techniques and components that we use in our everyday hardware work, for which their connection and coding is almost a done deal. We are familiar with them and have used them before, so we drop them in without a second thought. But what about the first time we used them, we […]
It might be difficult for modern audiences to believe, but at one point Microsoft Windows fit on floppy disks. This was a simpler time, with smaller hard drives, lower resolution displays, and no hacker blogs for you to leave pessimistic comments on. A nearly unrecognizable era, to be sure. But if you’re one of the […]