Programming Ada: First Steps On The Desktop

Who doesn’t want to use a programming language that is designed to be reliable, straightforward to learn and also happens to be certified for everything from avionics to rockets and ICBMs? De…

Design Review: DPI-LVDS Sony Vaio LCD Devboard

Ordering a PCB with mistakes sucks. We should help each other avoid such mistakes – especially newcomers. One of the best ways to avoid these mistakes, especially if it’s your first one…

Beyond The Basics: Exploring More Exotic Scope Trigger Modes

Last time, we looked at some powerful trigger modes found on many modern scopes, including the Rigol DHO900 series we used as an example. Those triggers were mostly digital or, at least, threshold-…

Game Graphics: Rasterization

Last time, I talked about racing the beam, a type of graphics used when memory was scarce. Now it’s time to step into the future with more memory and talk about what modern 2D games still do …

Beyond The Basics: Exploring Exotic Scope Trigger Modes

Will Rogers once said that veterinarians are the best doctors because their patients can’t tell them where it hurts. I’ve often thought that electronic people have a similar problem. In…

Scope GUI Made Easier

Last time, I assembled a Python object representing a Rigol oscilloscope. Manipulating the object communicates with the scope over the network. But my original goal was to build a little GUI window…

How To Talk To Your Scope

It used to be only high-end test equipment that had some sort of remote control port. These days, though, they are quite common. Historically, test gear used IEEE-488 (also known as GPIB or, from t…

When Is Damascus Steel Not From Damascus?

If you grow up around a working blacksmith’s forge, there are a few subjects related to metalwork on which you’ll occasionally have a heated discussion. Probably the best known is the t…

USB-C For Hackers: Build Your Own PSU

What if you wanted to build your own USB-C PSU? Good news – it’s easy enough! If you ever wanted to retrofit a decent DC PSU of yours to the USB-C standard, say, you got a Lenovo/HP/Del…

Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages

After years of seeing people showing off and trading their badge Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) at Supercon, this year I finally decided to make one myself. Now for a first attempt, it would have been enoug…

A Pulse Of Annoyance About Oscillators, Followed By A Flyback Of A Rant

Everyone likes to play with high voltages, right?. Even though the danger of death goes up with every volt, it’s likely that a few readers will have at some time or other made fancy long spar…

Logic Analyzers: Capabilities And Limitations

Last time, we’ve used a logic analyzer to investigate the ID_SD and ID_SC pins on a Raspberry Pi, which turned out to be regular I2C, and then we hacked hotplug into the Raspberry Pi camera c…

Copper Be Gone: The Chemistry Behind PCB Etching

For a lot of reasons, home etching of PCBs is somewhat of a dying art. The main reason is the rise of quick-turn PCB fabrication services, of course; when you can send your Gerbers off and receive …

Share Your Projects: Leave Breadcrumbs

I’ve talked about a low-effort way to document your projects by taking plenty of pictures, and about ways that your PCBs could be documenting themselves. Today, let’s talk about a quick…

All About USB-C: Example Circuits

In the six months that have passed after the last USB-C article has been released, I have thought up a bunch of ways that these articles could have been improved. It’s, of course, normal to h…

DisplayPort: Taming The Altmode

The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time, we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 i…

PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done

We’ve started designing a PCIe card last week, an adapter from M.2 E-key to E-key, that adds an extra link to the E-key slot it carries – useful for fully utilizing a few rare but fancy…

DisplayPort: Tapping The Altmode

Really, the most modern implementation of DisplayPort is the USB-C DisplayPort altmode, synonymous with “video over USB-C”, and we’d miss out if I were to skip it. Incidentally, o…