FPGA guru [Max Maxfield] recently took a look at the XLR8 (pronounced accelerate) board from a company called Alorium. On the surface, it looks like another Arduino UNO clone. But instead of a CPU, it contains an Intel MAX10 FPGA that runs a softcore AVR processor. Of course, that’s only part of the story. If the board was […]
ARDUINO AND FPGA DONE DIFFERENTLY Continue Reading
[Andrew] wonders why the SerialUSB() function on the Cortex M3-based Arduino Due is so much faster than Serial() on the Uno or Nano, and shares his observations in this short video. He sets up an experiment with a simple sketch on both boards and uses Wireshark to evaluate the results. Data is sent in the USB packets in groups of
ARDUINO SERIAL VS SERIALUSB Continue Reading
We’ve gotten used to seeing “meta clocks,” clocks that use an array of analog clock faces and piece together characters using the hands of the clocks. They’re very clever, and we always like to see them, especially when they come with detailed build instructions like this one does. What’s also nice about [Erich Styger]’s “MetaClockClock” display
CLOCK-OF-CLOCKS ADDS LIGHT-PIPE HANDS FOR BEAUTY AND FUNCTION Continue Reading
Retired scientist [Mark Howe] spent the last couple months making an animatronic movie featuring his LEGO lunar lander in a video recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing (also embedded below). [Mark] is not only the producer, but serves as the technical director, set designer, and cameraman as well. He designed and 3D-printed a custom special effects
LEGO LUNAR LANDER ANIMATRONIC MOVIE RELEASED Continue Reading
When one thinks of the Arduino Uno, one thinks of a capable 8-bit microcontroller platform that nonetheless doesn’t set the world alight with its performance. Unlike more modern parts like the ESP32, it has just a single core and no real multitasking abilities. But what if one wanted to run many threads on an Uno
RUNNING 57 THREADS AT ONCE ON THE ARDUINO UNO Continue Reading
If you are considering entering the Arduino Day Challenge this year, you will need to submit your project to the Arduino team by March 24th, 2021 for a chance to win the Arduino hardware and prizes on offer. The Arduino Day 2021 Challenge will award the top 10 community projects that stand out for their
Arduino Day 2021 Challenges enter your Arduino project to win Continue Reading
Hardware fault injection uses electrical manipulation of a digital circuit to intentionally introduce errors, which can be used to cause processors to behave in unpredictable ways. This unintentional behavior can be used to test for reliability, or it can be used for more nefarious purposes such as accessing code and data that was intended to
INJECTING BUGS WITH AN ELECTRIC FLYSWATTER Continue Reading
I got a relatively inexpensive 6040 CNC machine, and have been spending most weekends making the thing work, and then cutting stuff, learning the toolchain, and making subsequent improvements. Probably 90% of my machine time has been on making improvements. It’s not that the machine was bad — I got the version with ballscrews and a decently
BALANCED DESIGN AND HOW TO KNOW WHEN TO QUIT OPTIMIZING Continue Reading
We’ve all got projects kicking around that we haven’t had time to document for our own purposes, let alone expose to the blinding light of the Internet. There are only so many hours in a day, and let’s face it, building the thing is a lot more fun than taking pictures of it. It took
KEEP COOL WITH THIS OPEN SOURCE AVR FAN CONTROLLER Continue Reading
The Etch-A-Sketch was a toy that demanded mastery. Some grew capable of creating masterful artworks, while others struggled to do more than a jumbled mess of angry, angular lines. The inherent limitations of being able to only draw a singular, connected line are all part of the fun, of course, and [gatoninja236] recreated that in a
BUILDING AN LED ETCH-A-SKETCH Continue Reading
