It’s generally pretty easy to spot a microcontroller on a PCB. There are clues aplenty: the more-or-less central location, the nearby crystal oscillator, the maze of supporting passives, and perhaps even an obvious flash chip lurking about. The dead giveaway, though, is all those traces leading to the chip, betraying its primacy in the circuit. […]
Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell. As an example, here’s [calebccf] with an emulated 6502 system in a busybox ash shell script. What’s in the emulator? A simple 6502 system with RAM, […]
Hackers enjoy a good theme, and so it comes as no surprise that every time March 14th (Pi Day) rolls around, the tip line sees an uptick in mathematical activity. Whether it’s something they personally did or some other person’s project they want to bring to our attention, a lot of folks out there are […]
Do you like scientific calculators? Don’t bother answering that question, you’re reading Hackaday so we already know the answer. We also know you’re a fan of building things yourself and open source, which makes us fairly sure you’ll be just as interested in the recently announced ClockworkPi PicoCalc as we are. On the surface, it […]
Although most people would use C, C++ or MicroPython for programming microcontrollers, there are a few more obscure options out there as well, with MicroZig being one of them. Recently [Andrew Conlin] wrote about how to use MicroZig with the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU, showing the process of writing an SSD1306 OLED display driver and […]
Fluid simulations are a key tool in fields from aerospace to motorsports and even civil engineering. They can be three-dimensional and complicated and often run on supercomputer clusters bigger than your house. However, you can also do simple two-dimensional fluid simulations on very simple hardware, as [mircemk] demonstrates. This build is almost like a simple […]
Looking to write Rust on the ESP32? You’re in luck, a new challenger has entered the scene, looking to help you write code that lasts – [Scott Mabin] and the team from Espressif have brought us the esp-hal 1.0.0-beta. From a personal project to an Espressif-sponsored one to an effort under Espressif’s wing, [Scott] tells […]
If somebody asked you to visualize a CNC router, you’d probably think of some type of overhead gantry that moves a cutting tool over a stationary workpiece. It’s a straightforward enough design, but it’s not without some shortcomings. For one thing, the scale of such a machine can quickly become an issue if you want […]
[Abe] wanted the perfect portable computer. He has a DevTerm, but it didn’t quite fit his needs. This is Hackaday after all, so he loaded up his favorite CAD software and started designing. The obvious choice here would be a Raspberry Pi. But [Abe] didn’t want to drop in a Linux computer — he was […]
The release notes for the 2.1.1 Raspberry Pi Pico SDK have a late holiday present: The RP2040 chip is now certified to run at 200 MHz if you use at least 1.15V as the supply voltage. Previously, the certified speed was 125 MHz, although it was well-known you could overclock the device. By default, the […]