A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we […]
The ESP32-P4 is the new hotness on the microcontroller market. With RISC-V architecture and two cores running 400 MHz, to ears of a certain vintage it sounds more like the heart of a Unix workstation than a traditional MCU. Time’s a funny thing like that. [DynaMight] was looking for an excuse to play with this […]
If you’ve wiring up a microcontroller and need some kind of storage, it’s likely you’ll reach for an SD card. Compared to other ways of holding data on your project, SD cards are just so much cheaper, resilient to physical and magnetic shocks, and simpler to work with from both a hardware and software perspective. […]
Emulating older computers on microcontrollers has been a staple of retrocomputing for many years now, with most 8-bit and some 16-bit machines available on Atmel, ARM, or ESP32 platforms. But there’s always been a horsepower limit, a point beyond which a microcontroller is no longer enough, and a “proper” computer is needed. One of those […]
If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful. Named roo_display for unclear reasons, the library is Arduino-compatible, and suits a wide range of ESP32 boards out in the wild. It’s intended […]
If you need to drive a big screen for a project, it’s fair to say your first thought isn’t going to be to use the ATtiny85. With just 512 bytes of RAM and 8 kilobytes of flash memory, the 8-bit micro seems a little cramped to drive, say, a 10″ screen. Yet that’s exactly what […]
Have you heard the saying “the problem is the solution”? It seems to originate in the permaculture movement, but it can apply equally well to electronics. Take the problem [shiura] had: a Casio Mini CM-602 that had let out the magic smoke. The solution was a twofer: rebuild the Casio into a modern number cruncher […]
We’ve seen a few H-bridge circuits around these parts before, and here’s another application. This time we have an Old Train Station Clock which has been refurbished after being picked up for cheap at the flea market. These are big analog clocks which used to be common at railway stations around the world. This build […]
[Andrew Menadue] wrote in to let us know about the TULIP-DevBoard and TULIP-Module being developed on GitHub. TULIP is short for “The Ultimate Intelligent Peripheral” and it’s an everything expansion board for the HP-41 line of handheld calculators sold by HP from 1979 to 1990. These particular calculators support Reverse Polish notation which seems to […]
With two cores at 240 MHz and about 8.5 MB of non-banked RAM if you’re using the right ESP32-S3 version, this MCU seems at least in terms of specifications to be quite the mini PC. Obviously this means that it should be capable of self-hosting its compiler, which is exactly what [Valentyn Danylchuk] did with […]