Tech note: making your own V-I plots at home

Michał Zalewski on the lcamtuf’s thing blog says when working on the book, The Secret Life of Circuits, he wanted to keep the artwork real.

My beef with the diagrams in popular electronics textbooks and online tutorials is that most of them are fake. At best, they’re retraced from ancient texts; at worst, they’re sketched from memory and can be charitably described as “inspired by true events”.

The Secret Life of Circuits contains about 290 original illustrations and does its best to avoid such shenanigans. I painstakingly gathered real data for everything from quartz crystal frequency response, to battery discharge curves, to signal reflections in a 100 ft run of coax cable strewn around the workshop, to the behavior of vacuum tubes.

See how real-world measurements differed from the pretty textbook diagrams in the post here.

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Bidirectional BLE Communication between Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico W

Random Nerd Tutorials shows how to establish a bidirectional Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication between a Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pi Pico.

The Raspberry Pi Pico will be set as a BLE peripheral with two characteristics. The Raspberry Pi will read and write to those characteristics, establishing a bidirectional communication.

For the Raspberry Pi Python program, we’ll use the bleak library, and for the Pico MicroPython program, we’ll use the aioble library.

Check out this guide in the post here.

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Running DOOM on a custom CPU and going viral

Doom is a video game made by id Software that released in 1993. It was a revolution in gaming that spread across the world and defined the modern FPS. Its popularity has given rise to the saying “Doom can run on anything”. To prove this point Doom has been ported to almost everything, from microcontrollers, to toasters, and even bacteria.

Armaan Gomes and Liam successfully ran (crawled) Doom on a CPU built from scratch (and then posted a video that got a few million views).

To be honest, I still can’t believe it. What did we really do though? Well, we designed a custom CPU at the logic gate level, connected it to peripherals, adapted the DOOM source code to run on our machine, and deployed it onto an FPGA to run in real time. Before running Doom, we had only run simple programs that we had written, like Pong and Mandelbrot sets. Now we can run full published games, but getting here was a rather rocky road.

Check out the hardware and software design in the post here.

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See inside insects with an electron microscope and a femtosecond laser

Ben Krasnow on the Applied Science YouTube Channel posts about seeing inside insects with an electron microscope and a femtosecond laser.

I use a femtosecond laser like a lightsaber to cross section insects and inspect them with an electron microscope. What’s really inside an insect’s head?

Femtosecond laser built by Oscillate Photonics: https://oscillatephotonics.com/

Open Beam Interface from Nanographs: https://github.com/nanographs/Open-Beam-Interface

See the video below:

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UPDATED GUIDE: Adafruit NeoPixel Überguide #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

The Adafruit NeoPixel Überguide has been updated with info for how to use the new 5050 WWA White LEDs with Integrated Drivers that you can find in the NeoPixel Stick – 8 x 5050 WWA White LEDs with Integrated Drivers. WWA LEDs have 3 white LEDs in them in three tints (also known as ‘color temperatures’): warm white, cool white and amber, great for excellent lighting effects that want pure white lite. These are fun and glowy, and you can control each LED individually!

Read more at Adafruit NeoPixel Überguide

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Starting a ZX Spectrum shooting gallery in earnest

Michael Martin is working through a port of a shooting gallery Rosetta-stone program to the ZX Spectrum.

It’s been a long road. We started out knowing how to control text and bitmap output and a decent handle on I/O. From there we designed a reasonably efficient blitting system that operated on 16×16 “sprites” that we carefully prepared for efficient blitting.

Even this wasn’t enough to keep our graphics updates smooth, though, so we then had to carefully arrange our bitmap operations to tear instead of flicker. I’ve been putting this project together bit by bit.

See how Michael has built out other parts in the post here.

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Using a MikroTik as a home router

Rafał Opiłowski was looking at setting up a new homelab, starting with a comprehensive networking setup.

Given my experiences related to performance and security issues with ISP-provider routers, I wanted to have a better control over the traffic on my home network. I decided to heavily focus traffic on wired connections, to offload WiFi and ensure connection between devices over local network are as fast as possible.

That’s where Mikrotik L009UiGS-RM comes in play. It has enough Gigabit Ethernet ports to connect all my Ethernet ports on the walls. PoE is a nice bonus too, as I can power my access point without having to use a wall wart.

See how each part of the network were set up in the post here.

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