Chip Mystery: The Case Of The Purloined Pin

Let’s face it — electronics are hard. Difficult concepts, tiny parts, inscrutable datasheets, and a hundred other factors make it easy to screw up in new and exciting ways. Sometimes th…

LoRA, With No Radio

A LoRa project has traditionally required a dedicated radio module, because it’s a commercially licenced protocol. But as the way it works has been progressively reverse engineered, it’…

Bring Linux To CH32V003 Through, Yes, RISC-V Emulation

Like playing around with Linux on low-power devices? You’d be hard pressed to find a better example than the [tvlad1234]’s linux-ch32v003 project. It’s not just a one-off — …

A Very 21st Century Receiver For A Very 20th Century Band

The FM broadcast band has been with us since the middle of the 20th century, and despite many tries to unseat it, remains a decent quality way to pick up your local stations. It used to be that bui…

An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The h…

The Small And Silly Synth Now Even Smaller (But Just As Silly)

What do you do when you’ve carved out a niche for yourself as a builder of small and useless synthesizers? Why, build an even smaller and less useful synthesizer, of course! If you’ve b…

Adding Temperature Sensor Functionality To The CH32V003 MCU

As cheap as the WCH CH32V003 MCU is, its approximately $0.10 price tag looks far less attractive when you need to start adding on external ICs for missing basic features, such as temperature measur…

Pocket CO2 Sensor Doubles As SMD Proving Ground

While for some of us it’s a distant memory, every serious electronics hobbyist must at some point make the leap from working with through-hole components to Surface Mount Devices (SMD). At fi…

The New Hotness

If there’s one good thing to be said about the chip shortage of 2020-2023 (and counting!) it’s that a number of us were forced out of our ruts, and pushed to explore parts that we never would have …

Modern Components Enable Cheap And Compact Nixie Driver Circuit

Nixie tubes can add some retro flair to any project, but they can also complicate your electronics quite a bit: after all, you need to generate a voltage high enough to ignite the tube and then swi…

A CH32V003 Toolchain — If You Can Get One To Try It On

We’re in an exciting time for cheap microcontrollers, as with both the rise of RISC-V and the split between ARM and its Chinese subsidiary, a heap of super-cheap and very capable parts are co…