When all you have is a hammer…….

Last weekend I attended a retro-computing fair at the Centre of Computing History in Cambridge.  This was my first visit to this popuar museum and I was impressed by the range of exhibits that they had on show.

35 years ago – Cambridge was buzzing with computer activity – and it was home to at least two of the prominent home computer companies in the early 1980s – Acorn and Sinclair.  Machines of this era were on prominent display throughout the museum.

I got my first computer around this same time – a ZX81 which I built up from a kit –...

Arduino meets open FPGA

BlackIce Open FPGA – Includes an 80MHz “Arduino”

Arduino is the Marmite of embedded programming – you either love it or hate it.

Regardless of how you feel about it – Arduino in the last 12 years probably has introduced more people to embedded programming of microcontrollers than any other organisation. What started with the humble AVR ATmega8 in 2005 has grown to include a multitude of different microcontrollers. and devices.

Initially the Arduino IDE handled only Atmel AVR microcontrollers – but with the addition of the Arduino Due board, it has opened up to include ARM devices – including parts by...

www.apertus.org: AXIOM Team Talk Volume 13.1- SDI Module, SMT Workshop and Exhibition

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=efT7BhaubyM

We know a lot of people are waiting for news about hardware production and we are doing production and development in parallel. Our most recent article talked about progress with electronics manufacturing - in this article and Team Talk we want to share news about new ongoing developments though.
AXIOM Beta Dual 6G SDI module in development When choosing between HDMI and SDI we have so far given HDMI priority as, for developers working with the AXIOM Beta, it meant a larger and more affordable choice of monitors, recorders and accessories (even if doing so risked the Beta being wrongfully perceived...

Control any TV with your voice

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QIhID-GYiew/0.jpg

Few months ago I was writing about the Broadlink RM3 mini in this article.
The big news is that nows supports the  Amazon "Alexa" voice control.
So saying "Alexa, change to channel 77 on Television" will change your TV to channel 77.
You can also rename your favorite channel to a specific name and call it like this: "Alexa, change to channel Sport on Television" and the Broadcom RM3 mini will do that for you.
To have all this features you need to install this application from Google Play ( I don't know for iPhone) and make sure  you have the latest version of...

Simple Commodore PET Tape Interface

Before I put together a long term solution, I wanted a quick way to transfer software from my PC to my Commodore PET. There are other circuits, but I wanted something that used just one part.

The PET input is TTL level, so I needed something to go from audio level to TTL. Ideally a comparator circuit with plenty of gain. Well, I couldn’t find a decent comparator in my junk box, but I did find a CA3140 op-amp. This is way faster than I needed, but should work OK as a comparator. If you build this circuit, try to...

Purism Librem 5 campaign

There's a new project currently undergoing crowd funding that might be of interest to the former Openmoko community: The Purism Librem 5 campaign.

Similar to Openmoko a decade ago, they are aiming to build a FOSS based smartphone built on GNU/Linux without any proprietary drivers/blobs on the application processor, from bootloader to userspace.

Furthermore (just like Openmoko) the baseband processor is fully isolated, with no shared memory and with the Linux-running application processor being in full control.

They go beyond what we wanted to do at Openmoko in offering hardware kill switches for camera/phone/baseband/bluetooth. During Openmoko days we assumed it is sufficient to simply control all those bits from the trusted...

Game release: The Echidna Menace

Over the years I've dabbled making lots of small games, but I've always been afraid to release. This game isn't perfect, but it actually has some fun to it.

The sad state of voice support in cellular modems

Cellular modems have existed for decades and come in many shapes and kinds. They contain the cellular baseband processor, RF frontend, protocol stack software and anything else required to communicate with a cellular network. Basically a phone without display or input.

During the last decade or so, the vast majority of cellular modems come as LGA modules, i.e. a small PCB with all components on the top side (and a shielding can), which has contact pads on the bottom so you can solder it onto your mainboard. You can obtain them from vendors such as Sierra Wireless, u-blox, Quectel, ZTE, Huawei, Telit, Gemalto,...

First actual XMOS / XCORE project

For many years I've been fascinated by the XMOS XCore architecture. It offers a surprisingly refreshing alternative virtually any other classic microcontroller architectures out there. However, despite reading a lot about it years ago, being fascinated by it, and even giving a short informal presentation about it once, I've so far never used it. Too much "real" work imposes a high barrier to spending time learning about new architectures, languages, toolchains and the like.

Rather than having lots of fixed-purpose built-in "hard core" peripherals for interfaces such as SPI, I2C, I2S, etc. the XCore controllers have a combination of

I/O ports for...

Splitting the Atom

It’s not everyday that you meet someone with the talent and tenacity of Dave Banks (@hoglet67 on Twitter).  In less than three days, Dave ported his FPGA based Acorn Atom from Xilinx and VHDL across to Lattice ICE40 and verilog. The result is a fully functioning Acorn Atom – running on our latest open source FPGA board, BlackIce.

The Atom was a forerunner of the Acorn Electron and the BBC Micro. It used a 6502 microprocessor an provided a chunky colour display – which was virtually unknown back in 1980 when the Atom first appeared.

On Friday, Dave emailed me to say...