The patient hooked up for some reverse-engineering. (Credit: Caralynx, Twitter) Released in July of 2025, the Tamagotchi Paradise may look somewhat like the late 90s toy that terrorized parents and teachers alike for years, but it’s significantly more complex and powerful hardware-wise. This has led many to dig into its ARM Cortex-M3-powered guts, including [Yukai […]
Keeping track of time is essential, even for microcontrollers, which is why a real-time clock (RTC) peripheral is a common feature in MCUs. In the case of the STM32 family there are three varieties of RTC peripherals, with the newest two creatively called ‘RTC2′ and RTC3’, to contrast them from the very basic and barebones […]
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 […]
Retrocomputers need ROMs, but they’re just so read only. Enter the latest incarnation of [Piers]’s One ROM to rule them all, now built with a RP2350, because the newest version is 5V capable. This can replace the failing ROMs in your old Commodore gear with this sweet design on a two-layer PCB, using a cheap […]
ECE 4760/5730 is the Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course at Cornell University taught by [Hunter Adams]. The list of projects for spring this year includes forty write-ups — if you haven’t got time to read the whole lot you can pick a random project between 1 and 40 with: shuf -i 1-40 -n 1 […]
[David] is building a project with an OLED, a keyboard, and an RP2040. He’s perfected a scanning routine in C to work with the keyboard, but he still had some places he wanted to use even lower-level instructions. That was as good an excuse as any to experiment with inline assembly language inside the C […]
Bus Pirate is nearly a household name in the hardware hacking world. The first version came out way back in 2008, and there have been several revisions since then. You can buy pre-built Bus Pirate devices, but there’s also the option now to build our own. The ESP32 Bus Pirate project has everything you need […]
E-paper screens have opened up a wide variety of novel use cases that just wouldn’t work with the higher power draw of an LCD. [gokux] thought it would be perfect for a digital sticky note. Using a Waveshare 2.9″ e-paper display hooked up to a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3, a battery, and a switch all […]
In a recent video our hacker [Electronic Wizard] introduces the 74HC595 shift register and explains how to use it to drive 7-segment displays. [Electronic Wizard] explains that understanding how to apply the 74HC595 can increase the quality of your projects and also help keep the demands on the number of pins from your microcontroller to […]