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How Shrinking Feature Size Made Modern Wireless Work

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If you’re living your life right, you probably know what as MOSFET is. But do you know the MESFET? They are like the faster, uninsulated, Schottky version of a MOSFET, and they used to rule the roost in radio-frequency (RF) silicon. But if you’re like us, and you have never heard of a MESFET, then give this phenomenal video by [Asianometry] a watch. In it, among other things, he explains how the shrinking feature size in CMOS made RF chips cheap, which brought you the modern cellphone as we know it. The basic overview is that in the 1960s, most high-frequency stuff had to be done with discrete parts because the bipolar-junction semiconductors of the time were just too slow. At this time, MOSFETs were just becoming manufacturable , but were even slower still. The MESFET, without its insulating oxide layer between the metal and the silicon, had less capacitance, and switched faster. When silicon feature sizes got small enough that you could do gigahertz work with them, the MESFET wa...

How a Tiny Relay Became a USB Swiss Army Knife

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Meet the little board that could: [alcor6502]’s tiny USB relay controller , now evolved into a multifunction marvel. Originally built as a simple USB relay to probe the boundaries of JLCPCB’s production chops, it has become a compact utility belt for any hacker’s desk drawer. Not only has [alcor6502] actually built the thing, he even provided intstructions. If you happened to be at Hackaday in Berlin , you now might even own one, as he handed out twenty of them during his visit. If not, read on and build it yourself. This thing is not just a relay, and that is what makes it special. Depending on a few solder bridges and minimal components, it shape-shifts into six different tools: a fan controller (both 3- and 4-pin!), servo driver, UART interface, and of course, the classic relay. It even swaps out a crystal oscillator for USB self-sync using STM32F042 ‘s internal RC – no quartz, less cost, same precision. A dual-purpose BOOT0 button lets you flash firmware and toggle outputs, depe...

Lockdown Remote Control Project is Free and Open

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If you flew or drove anything remote controlled until the last few years, chances are very good that you’d be using some faceless corporation’s equipment and radio protocols. But recently, open-source options have taken over the market, at least among the enthusiast core who are into squeezing every last bit of performance out of their gear. So why not take it one step further and roll your own complete system? Apparently, that’s what [Malcolm Messiter] was thinking when, during the COVID lockdowns, he started his own RC project that he’s calling LockDownRadioControl . The result covers the entire stack, from the protocol to the transmitter and receiver hardware, even to the software that runs it all. The 3D-printed remote sports a Teensy 4.1 and off-the-shelf radio modules on the inside, and premium FrSky hardware on the outside. He’s even got an extensive folder of sound effects that the controller can play to alert you. It’s very complete. Heck, the transmitter even has a game of...

The Transputer in your Browser

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We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a JavaScript emulator for the transputer , you can try in your browser. If you don’t recall, the transputer was a groundbreaking CPU architecture made for parallel processing. Instead of giant, powerful CPUs, the transputer had many simple CPUs and a way to chain them all together. Sounds great, but didn’t quite make it. However, you can see the transputer’s influence on CPUs even today. Made to work with occam, the transputer was built from the ground up for concurrent programming. Context switching was cheap, along with simple message passing and hardware scheduling. The ersatz computer has a lot of messages in Spanish, but you can probably muddle through if you don’t hablar español . We did get the ray tracing example to work, but it was fairly slow. Want to know more abou...

First PCB with the Smallest MCU?

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[Morten] works very fast. He has already designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market , and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below. You might have heard about this new TI ARM Cortex MO micro on these very pages, where we asked you what you’d do with this grain-of-rice-sized chunk of thinking sand . (The number one answer was “sneeze and lose it in the carpet”.) From the video, it looks like [Morten] would design a breakout board using Kicad 8, populate it, get it blinking, and then use its I2C lines to make a simple digital thermometer demo. In the video, he shows how he worked with the part, from making a custom footprint to spending quite a while nudging it into place before soldering it carefully down. But he nailed it on the first try, and honestly it doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as we’d feared, mostly because of the two-row layout of the balls. It actually looks easy enough to fan out. Because you ca...

Vintage Computer Festival East This Weekend

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If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East . After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [ Brian Kernighan ]. Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops , but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout. [Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year , so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments! from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/UdTflDY

The Weird Way A DEC Alpha Boots

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We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure . Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 da...