Repair: Allied Telesis AT-8000GS 24port gigabit switches

Replacing self-annihilating fans and reverse-engineering console cables.

Goodbye, Dominic

Just over ten years ago I sent my first email to Dominic Spill:

“We haven’t met, Dominic, but I hope you don’t mind being included on this message. I thought you two might be interested in some work I finally got around to writing up. . .”

I had been exploring the use of software-defined radio for Bluetooth monitoring and had found Dominic’s paper on the subject. He and I quickly began collaborating on the development of tools and techniques that improved upon the methods in his paper. Just three months later, we presented Building an All-Channel Bluetooth Monitor at ShmooCon 2009.

We...

Back to BASICS

In March of 2017, I began to follow a project on Hackaday.io for a microcomputer constructed entirely out of common TTL integrated circuits.  TTL stands for transistor-transistor logic, and appeared first in the very late 1960s.  Several of the iconic minicomputers of the early 1970s were constructed from TTL integrated circuits – including the Data General Nova and the DEC PDP-11. Remarkably the descendants of this family of logic devices are still available today, using modern high speed CMOS process so that they are much faster yet consume a lot less power.  In real terms they are also a lot...

scanlime049 – iCEBreaker FPGA Quick Look

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=K8ck-44gRjU

Today’s video is about a package sent in by 1BitSquared with a prototype FPGA board. These boards are part of a new generation of open hardware which builds on a foundation of open source FPGA tools. At the time we streamed this live, the crowdfunding campaign was about to launch. It’s been successfully funded, and at this time you can pre-order boards from the next batch.

scanlime049 – iCEBreaker FPGA Quick Look

The iCEBreaker page is on Crowd Supply.

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, where recurring donations...

scanlime048 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 4

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=NBIaS6GA0cQ

In the fourth and final part of our HUB75-style display driver series, we make a cool demo in gateware using the modular driver! In this segment we’ll add a frame buffer and implement a video feedback plus munching squares effect in Verilog and Icestudio.

scanlime048 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 4

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs...

scanlime047 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 3

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=Qs1gSzAy4Q4

In the third part of our HUB75-style display driver in Verilog and Icestudio, we start looking at demoscene-style effects to implement next, and implement a gamma correction and dithering module to improve color quality.

scanlime047 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 3

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is available on Github.

Thank you...

scanlime046 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 2

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=RKKXaWz9mMQ

In this second part of the HUB75-style display driver in Verilog and Icestudio, we’ll debug and reorganize the existing gateware into something modular that we can build upon, with nice and stable Binary Code Modulation for brightness control.

scanlime046 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 2

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is...

[Перевод] Making a DIY text laser projector

Let’s find out how to make a simple enough laser projector out of electronics you can find at home.

Пожалуй, самый быстрый релейный компьютер в мире

Спустя два года проектирования и сборки мой проект релейного компьютера ожил и стал способен исполнять прогарммы, написанные на эзотерическом языке программирования brainfuck. Уже сейчас он без сбоев исполняет 25 инструкций в секунду, а в планах добиться стабильной работы на 40Гц.
Компьютер еще не завершен — надо навести марафет внешнему виду — сделать переднюю и заднюю крышки, подвал, добавить органы управления, да уложить красиво многочисленные шлейфы. Но проект можно однозначно назвать успешным.

Sound Blaster 1.0 Principles of Operation

The Sound Blaster 1.0 was not the first PC sound card, but it was the first to support digital sound, two different types of sound synthesis, MIDI, and a joystick all in one card. Let’s lift the hood and examine how the card does its magic.
You can follow along by looking at the schematic here.

Sound Playback
There are three methods a Sound Blaster card uses to play back digital audio.

Direct DAC
The first is called Direct DAC and it means that the PC software has to feed the sound card each sample at just the right time. It works a lot like...