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Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
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The Web MiniDisc App (2020)
Get control of your MiniDisc device thanks to WebUSB and WASM
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Spatial Audio
I got the following e-mail from a producer/engineer: “I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out. Â Atmos catalog remixing is being done…
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Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
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Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
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Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
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Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS
Earlier this year, I pitted the $549 ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 NAS against a homebrew $350 Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS, and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the Lockerstor was better in almost every regard. Well, ASUSTOR introduced a new lower-cost NAS, the $329 Drivestor 4 Pro (model AS3304T—pictured above), and sent…
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JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
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Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
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Conway's Game of Life on FPGA
When learning a new programming language, I like having a well defined yet non-trivial problem to solve. Conway’s Game of Life (GoL) fits this definition. It has enough depth to uncover various tradeoffs. So naturally, when I picked up Chisel hardware description language (HDL), I wanted to build Game of Life in FPGA…
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Tried Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – still no external GPU on a Pi
Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…
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Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
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Tesla Project Dojo Overview
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly…
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Practical Transformer Winding (2010)
Instructions on how to design, calculate and build power transformers.
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Programming PIC32 Microcontroller with Rust
Programming PIC32 Microcontroller with Rust, AKA running rust on bare metal
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Where’s the Apple M2?
DPReview just published Apple still hasn't made a truly “Pro” M1 Mac – so what’s the holdup? Following on the good performance and awesome power efficiency of the Apple M1 , there’s a hungry background rumble in Mac-land along the lines of “Since the M1 is an entry-level chip, the next CPU is gonna blow everyone’s…
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Things I would like to 3D print
Last year I started collecting ideas of things I would like to 3D print one day, on Twitter. Twitter is fundamentally ephemeral, so I'll collect it here instead. I got up to 14 items on Twitter, and now I'm up to 25.
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Netflix and Spotify on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Chromium and Widevine
As of 3-30-2020, if you want the “paste-one-line-it-just-works” go to: vpetkov.net/2020/03/30/raspberry-pi-netflix-one-line-easy-install-along-with-hulu-amazon-prime-disney-plus-hbo-spotify-pandora-and-many-others/ ^^^ Please use the post linked above for my “one-line it just works” install ^^^ (Ignore everything…
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Reprogramming a Sennheiser Microphone
I'm somehow interested in audio production. But not it more my pet hobby, nothing that would generate decent income. This means I usually do...
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RISC-V isn’t as interesting as you think
I had wrote this before the Unleashed was revealed, so some of the bits on economics have changed. As of writing this, I still stand by my other beliefs. One of the most hyped things in hardware design is RISC-V,… Continue reading →
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An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom 1 , located at the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam. I was there to buy a Western Digital Raptor model WD740, with 74 GB of capacity, running at 10,000 RPM.
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A partially-automated medium-throughput homemade cider press with lasers
Most people who know me well know I really like apples. I'm a big fan for a lot of reasons- taste, texture, the fact that they're a symbol of my favorite season, the sheer quantity of accessible food that can grow on a single tree, et cetera. Last year, I decided I wanted to make some homemade apple cider. I bought a…
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Cat Automatic Sprayer
If you have a cat, you know that sometimes his instincts push it to eat green eatable-looking plants, whatever they are, and whatever the consequences may be.
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Build an SMS Forwarder with Raspberry Pi Zero W and Waveshare SIM7000E Hat
In this guide, I will explain how to receive SMS messages and forward them to your Telegram account using Raspberry PI Zero W and Wireshare GSM hat. Python will be used to read SMS messages and forward them to Telegram Bot API. Messages will be listened to by Gammu SMS service and it will trigger the Python script…