MUDLink Is Making UART Data Links More Reliable

Many of us have used UARTs to spit data from one system or chip to another. Normally, for quick and dirty maker projects, this is good enough. However, you’ll always get the odd dropped trans…

Manta: An Open On-FPGA Debug Interface

We always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your c…

Souped-Up Reflective Sensor Uses Itself For Wireless Programming

Proximity sensors are common enough in automation projects that we hardly give them a second thought — pick something with specs that match the job and move on. But they can be fussy to get a…

Reverse Engineering Reveals EV Charger Has A Sense Of Security

As more and more electric vehicles penetrate the market, there’s going to have to be a proportional rise in the number of charging stations that are built into parking garages, apartment comp…

Anyone Can Be The Master Of This Master Lock Safe

[Etienne Sellan] got one of these lovely $5 logic analyzers. As with any shiny new tool, he started looking for things to investigate with it, and his gaze fell on a Sentry Safe (produced by Master…

Boards For Playful Exploration Of Digital Protocols

Teaching people efficiently isn’t limited to transmitting material from one head to another — it’s also about conveying the principles that got us there. [Mara Bos] shows us a too…

The Virtue Of Wires In The Age Of Wireless

We ran an article this week about RS-485, a noise resistant differential serial multidrop bus architecture. (Tell me where else you’re going to read articles like that!) I’ve had my fun…

Retro Serial Terminal Uses Modern Chips To Get CP/M Machine Talking

The hobbyists of the early days of the home computer era worked wonders with the comparatively primitive chips of the day, and what couldn’t be accomplished with a Z80 or a 6502 was often rel…

You Can Send MIDI Over I2C If You Really Need To

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface has a great acronym that is both nice to say and cleanly descriptive. The standard for talking to musical instruments relies on a serial signal at 31250 bps…

Did You Know That The Raspberry Pi 4 Has More SPI, I2C, UART Ports?

We’ve gotten used to the GPIO-available functions of Raspberry Pi computers remaining largely the same over the years, which is why it might have flown a little bit under the radar: the Raspb…

Turn On Sarcasm With The Flip Of A Switch

Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to distinguish in online communities. So much, in fact, that a famous internet rule called Poe’s Law is named after the phenomenon. To adapt, users have adopt…

Reverse Engineering A Topfield VFD Front Panel

Hackers love the warm glow of a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD), and there’s no shortage of dead consumer electronics from which they can be pulled to keep our collective parts bins nicely s…

Digital Audio For Microcontrollers Doesn’t Come Much Simpler Than A WART

Adding an audio channel to your microcontroller project can mean a pile of extra components and a ton of processing power, as a compressed stream must be retrieved and sent to a dedicated DAC. Or i…

Hacking A Solar Inverter RF Interface

One of the main advantages of cheap wireless modules is that they get used in consumer electronics, so if you know what’s being used you can build your own compatible hardware. While investig…

Python Runs Through A Zombified 8-Bit AVR

As amazing as CircuitPython is, it hasn’t yet been ported to any 8-bit microcontrollers. [Chris Heo] was unsatisfied with his inability to use Python on his 8-bit ATmega4808 AVR, so he worked…