microcontrollers

Dave Jones of EEVblog looks at a sub-3-cent microcontroller from Padauk and other obscure Chinese manufacturers. He shows how to find such parts and where to buy them in stock.

An Apple WWDC24 session introducing Embedded Swift, a subset of Swift with no runtime that targets tiny microcontrollers. It demonstrates the idea on an off-the-shelf Matter smart home device.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Ben Eater explains how a USB keyboard communicates, covering the electrical interface, bit and packet encoding, packet contents, and a comparison with PS/2.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science explains how electrophoretic e-paper displays work and how he modified the driver firmware and waveform lookup tables of a 4.2-inch panel to reach roughly 3Hz partial refresh. It covers the tweakable constants in the refresh process and touches on colored e-ink microcapsules.

The first part of Robert Baruch's series on building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen, a Python-based hardware description language. It introduces the HDL while implementing a simpler 6800 core.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.

A look inside Dr Abrasive's lab as he engineers a flash-card replacement for the Sega Saturn optical drive after cracking its CD protection 20 years on.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

Ben Vallack walks through designing a custom keyboard PCB from scratch using Ergogen and KiCad, ending with a gerber file ready to order from a PCB fabricator. The example is a split keyboard.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds and operates a simple mass spectrometer, using it to measure potassium isotopes in a salt substitute. He explains the design choices and the theory behind it.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

Applied Science builds a replica Apollo DSKY using an electroluminescent driver circuit and screen-printed conductive ink, with source and PCB files published.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Big Clive gives a 38-minute beginner's guide to identifying common electronic components and what they do. He keeps the maths minimal and aims to fill gaps for people just starting out.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

Ben Eater explains why he builds computers on breadboards, including testing their signal behavior on an oscilloscope. It is a companion to his 6502 breadboard computer series.

Andreas Spiess explains the basic principles of LoRa and LoRaWAN, their pros and cons, link budget and bandwidth. He shows his own gateway and client sending a message to The Things Network.

William Osman describes helping build parts of the MrBeast Squid Game event, including hacking together hundreds of wifi-controlled blood packs in about three weeks. He covers the chaos and near-failures along the way.

Marco Reps builds and tests an open-source 8.5 digit voltmeter based on CERN's high-precision ADC design. The video walks through assembly, soldering and measurement of the resulting instrument.

Ben Eater explains how the PS/2 keyboard interface works, covering its clocked serial protocol and scancodes. He builds up the hardware-level understanding needed to read keypresses.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

Peter Munch-Ellingsen explains at NimConf 2021 why he wrote his own keyboard firmware in Nim instead of using QMK or Arduino. He shows that the resulting firmware is very small.

CNLohr explains how he made an ESP32 produce valid LoRa packets without a LoRa radio, using aliasing and clever signal tricks. It walks through the RF math and shows how far the signals reach.

Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell present BadUSB at Black Hat 2014, showing that USB controller firmware can be reprogrammed to impersonate other device types. They demonstrate system compromise and a self-replicating USB threat that current defenses cannot detect.

A Ben Heck Show episode tearing down the Nintendo PlayStation prototype, one of the rarest consoles ever, with its owners Terry and Dan Diebold. Part 2 then gets it working again.

Breaking Taps tries to build semiconductor fabrication capability at home, working through decades of lithography history while chasing one-micrometer features. It documents the equipment, process steps and many setbacks along the way.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.