Old Dot-Matrix Displays Give Up Their Serial Secrets

If there’s one thing we like better around here than old, obscure displays, it’s old, obscure displays with no documentation that need a healthy dose of reverse engineering before they …

Beating Bitlocker In 43 Seconds

How long does it take to steal your Bitlocker keys? Try 43 seconds, using less than $10 in hardware. Encrypting your hard drive is good security. If you’re running Windows, the most popular s…

Pico-Sized Ham Radio

There are plenty of hobbies around with huge price tags, and ham radio can certainly be one of them. Experienced hams might have radios that cost thousands of dollars, with huge, steerable antennas…

Kaluma Puts JavaScript On The RP2040

With a simple firmware update, Kaluma puts a lightweight JavaScript runtime on the Raspberry Pi Pico (which uses the RP2040 microcontroller), providing handy modules for file systems, graphics, net…

Button, Button, Who’s Got The (Pico) Button?

There is an episode of Ren and Stimpy with a big red “history eraser’ button that must not be pressed. Of course, who can resist the temptation of pressing the unpressable button? The s…

Hands-Free Compass Uses Haptic Feedback

If you’ve never experienced it before, getting turned around on a cloudy day in the woods or getting lost during an event like a snowstorm can be extremely disorienting and stressful — …

Arbitrary Waveforms On The Cheap

A signal generator that can produce the usual sine, square, and triangle waves is handy and has been a staple of electronic benches for decades. Being able to craft custom signals opens up new hori…

Listening To Bats As They Search For Food

The range of human hearing goes up to about 20 kilohertz, which is fine for our purposes, but is pretty poor compared to plenty of other animal species. Dogs famously can hear up to about 60 kHz, a…

A BASIC Interpreter For The Raspberry Pi Pico

It’s pretty easy to program the Raspberry Pi Pico in Python, or you can use C or C++ if you so desire. However, if you fancy the easy language of yesteryear, you might like PiccoloBASIC from …

Pi Microcontroller Still Runs A Webserver

At first glance, the Raspberry Pi Pico might seem like a bit of a black sheep when compared to the other offerings from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. While most of the rest of their lineup can run L…

Videos Teach Bare Metal RP2040

When we write about retrocomputers, we realize that back in the day, people knew all the details of their computer. You had to, really, if you wanted to get anything done. These days, we more often…

Pi Pico Calculates Water Usage

Modern WiFi-enabled microcontrollers have made it affordable and easy to monitor everything from local weather information to electricity usage with typically no more than a few dollars worth of ha…

Old 3D CAD Mouse Gets New Lease Of Life

[Jacek Fedorynski] had an old Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D mouse with a serial interface which made it impossible for him to use with modern hardware and software. The problem he faced was two pronged &#…

Loki Is Part Cyberdeck, Part Sinclair Spectrum, And Pretty Tricky

You’ve got to watch out for Loki — he’s a trickster, after all, and he might make you think this semi-cyberdeck mash-up machine is named after him, when the backstory on this buil…

Pico Makes Capable Logic Analyzer

A common enough microcontroller project is to create some form of logic analyzer. In theory, it should be pretty easy: grab some digital inputs, store them, and display them. But, of course, the de…

Raspberry Pi Pico W Adds Wireless

News just in from the folks at Raspberry Pi: the newest version of their Pico has WiFi and is called, obviously, the Pico W. We were going to get our hands on a sample unit and kick its tires, but …

Need A JTAG Adapter? Use Your Pico!

JTAG is a powerful interface for low-level debugging and introspection of all kinds of devices — CPUs, FPGAs, MCUs and a whole lot of complex purpose-built chips like RF front-ends. JTAG adap…

Need A Logic Analyzer? Use Your Pico!

There’s a slew of hardware hacker problems that a logic analyzer is in a perfect position to solve. Whether you’re trying to understand why an SPI LCD screen doesn’t initialize, w…

Big LED Matrix Becomes Tiny LED Matrix Thanks To Fiber Optics

Everyone loves LED matrices, and even if you can’t find what you like commercially, it’s pretty easy to make just what you want. Need it big? No problem; just order a big PCB and some W…