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Eurorack Knob Idea
[Hardware] An idea for knobs for synthesizers.
Free Stuff - December 2024
The belated December 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Adrian Lam from Victoria, Australia! Adrian is a high school STEM teacher at a small, independent school and wants to create a Wireless Exploration Lab for his students, aimed at teaching the fundamentals of wireless communication systems.
The Wireless Exploration Lab will introduce students aged 14-18 to concepts such as radio wave propagation, spectrum analysis, and digital modulation, linking these concepts to the science/technology curriculum and real-world applications like IoT, mobile networks, and satellite communications. Once the lab is ready, students will lead a project of designing...
Free Stuff - November 2024
The belated November 2024 recipients for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program are the folks at iMagineLab makerspace in Antwerp, Belgium! iMagineLab is home to a community of students and tech enthusiasts alike that gather weekly to collaborate on and share knowledge for open source projects.
Thomas Janssen from iMagineLab has informed us of the makerspace’s upcoming project to build a digital radio receiver for receiving and decoding NOAA weather signals using open source software. Their goal is to then visualize NOAA weather images and collect and display data to create a weather monitoring station based on RF signals!
Thomas has...
Free Stuff - October 2024
The belated October 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Dustin Chambliss, who teaches at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi! Dustin currently teaches a 2 year electronics program and aims to revive an older and outdated communication course to focus on more modern technology. By obtaining a HackRF One, Dustin will be able to teach students about wireless communication including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular, and provide hardware for the updated curriculum. We are excited to be providing Dustin and his students with a HackRF One to continue their educational journeys and stay up to date...
A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=nxilekpLp6g
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In 1977, Commodore released the PET computer, a quirky home computer that combined the processor, a tiny keyboard, a cassette drive for storage, and a trapezoidal screen in a metal unit. The Commodore PET, the Apple II, and Radio Shack's TRS-80 started the home computer market with ready-to-run computers, systems that were called in retrospect the 1977 Trinity. I did much of my early programming on the PET, so when someone offered me a non-working PET a few years ago, I took it for nostalgic reasons.
You'd think that a home computer would be easy to repair, but it turned out to be a challenge. The chips in...
April Update: Risc It For A Biscuit
Hello and happy April! The past few months have been relatively quiet on the surface, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes. During the past three months we have seen some improvements for the PineTab2, PineTime and PineNote, along with the announcement that the PineTab-V is back in store and the new micro soldering tip set for the Pinecil. Charlie the Pinecorn also makes his yearly appearance in the update banner, artwork made by Caffeine.
We have been very happy with the feedback after the launch of the PineNote Community Edition. Users coming from the developer edition with...
Fritzing 1.0.5 released
Fritzing 1.0.5 is a maintenance release. It has been tested on Windows 11 24H2 (ARM and Intel), macOS Sequoia, macOS Ventura, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04. What is new Windows ARM Support for Windows on ARM CPUs. Fritzing uses Prism on Windows 24H2 to run on ARM. New Fonts We are fading out Droid Sans and Open Sans in favor of Noto Sans. This affects mostly the Breadboard and the Schematic View. A bunch of Fritzing parts was using unknown fonts, which resulted in using whatever fallback font the operating system provided. We have replaced these with either Noto Sans,...
Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.
The photo below shows the Pentium's thumbnail-sized silicon die under a microscope. I've labeled the main functional blocks. The microcode ROM is highlighted...
A USB interface to the "Mother of All Demos" keyset
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=DpshKBKt_os
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?" Engelbart developed many features of modern computing that we now take for granted: the mouse,1 hypertext, shared documents, windows, and a graphical user interface. At the 1968 Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart demonstrated these innovations in a groundbreaking presentation, now known as "The Mother of All Demos."
The keyset with...Comments to USTR Opposing Tariffs and Tariff Increases
The United States Trade Representative invited comments from the public this past month to assist them in making recommendations about how to address so-called “unfair trade practices by other countries” and “non-reciprocal trade relationships”. This is the public comment I left today on the USTR docket. I have also submitted similar comments to my senators and representative in Congress.
“I am deeply alarmed by the Trump administration’s decision last week to impose tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, as well as further increase tariffs on imports from China. As the CEO of Great Scott Gadgets, a small Colorado-based business that designs,...