Theoretically USB-C is a pretty nifty connector, but the reality is that it mostly provides many exciting new ways to make your device not work as expected. With the gory details covered by [Alvaro], the latest to join the party is Segger, with its J-Link BASE Compact MCU debugger displaying the same behavior which we […]
[WhiskeyTangoHotel] wrote in with his newest clock build — and he did warn us that it was minimalist and maybe less than useful. Indeed, it is nothing more than a super-cheap ESP32-C3 breakout board with an OLED screen and some code. Worse, you can’t even tell the time on it without pointing your cell phone […]
Chemical warfare detection was never supposed to be a hobbyist project. Yet here we are: Air Quality Guardian by [debdoot], the self-proclaimed world’s first open source chemical threat detection system, packs lab-grade sensing into an ESP32-based build for less than $100. Compare that with $10,000+ black-box hardware and you see why this is worth trying […]
For the past years people have been collecting disposable vapes primarily for their lithium-ion batteries, but as these disposable vapes have begun to incorporate more elaborate electronics, these too have become an interesting target for reusability. To prove the point of how capable these electronics have become, [BogdanTheGeek] decided to turn one of these vapes […]
If you haven’t heard of Minecraft, well, we hope you enjoyed your rip-van-winkle nap this past decade or so. For everyone else, you probably at least know that this is a multiplayer, open world game, you may have heard that running a Minecraft server is a good job for maxing out a spare a Raspberry […]
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 […]