Posts
A place where I document the things I do and stuff I find interesting.
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Making a DB9 console controller plug
Many consoles of the 8bit and 16bit era tend to use a D-Sub connector for their controller ports, usually a male DB9 on the console and a female DB9 at the end of the controller cable. For instance, the Atari controller plug below is shared among other consoles like the...
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Capacitive touch sensor with 555 timer
Quick prototype. I wanted to test wether an ICM7555 could be used to make a capacitive sensor by connecting an aluminum foil square as the C side of an astable configured 555 and how much of a difference in frequency would I get out of it. Setup Timer configured as...
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When adding an extra wire is not an option
At my former job we developed a series of industrial control hardware that control and integrates many types of hardware which in the end are connected using either UART, RS-232 or any easily convertible-to-RS232 communication interface. A common interface is the point-to-point variant of RS485/RS422 which is easily converted back...
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N0RAMboot: A Zero RAM bootloader
Not so long ago made an XMODEM serial bootloader for the SEGA Master System (link) and while it works pretty well, it has a few restrictions like upload size (being written mostly in C requires some RAM for working) and the uploaded ROM being able to bootstrap and relocate itself...
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Making a Roland mill understand g-code.
It is time to document one of my older projects, which I finished on a working state around ~5 years ago. The project in question makes an old Roland EGX-30 engraver accept a reasonable subset the very common machining language ‘g-code’ so it can be used for interesting tasks like...
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Micro85: An i8085 microcomputer
Having found some i8085 CPUs not so recently I decided to make a proper microcomputer with them, providing it with common peripherals like RS-232 ports, and some not so common for the day peripherals like an LCD screen and a DMA controller. On this page I will be documenting the...
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Redistributable WinCUPL virtual machine
If you just want the Virtual Machine file you can get it here. PLDs are neat little programmable logic meant to replace the typical 74xx00 glue logic with a single IC. While largely replaced by FPGAs and largely abandoned by almost all silicon corporations, Atmel (now Microchip) still manufactures new...
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Master System color pattern ROM
Video signal on my SEGA Master System is completly broken, so to have a clue wether the signal is OK using my scope, I needed a color pattern on the screen. The SMPTE color bars are an obvious option so I quickly coded a ROM to show just that. The...
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Making an i8085 microcomputer
Not so recently I’ve come around a bunch of Intel 8085 CPUs (actually SIEMENS clones) and decided to put them to work. As you can see on the pic above there is already some work done but I will document the project when more work is one. A few decissions...
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Verilog code and the resulting gate cost
Silly stupid experiment. How expensive is to add two numbers in Verilog? How expensive is subtracting? Multiplying? Shifting? Not finding any definite answer, I tried myself and synthetized some common stuff using Quartus and Verilog to see the results myself. Target FPGA is a Cyclone V 5CSEMA4U23C6 from an Atlas...
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64kbps is enough to stream video
Mobile internet providers usually give you a limited amount of data per month (1GB most commonly) at full 3g/4g speed, past this limit speed is reduced to 64kbps until the month ends or you pay for an extended data package. 64Kbps is pretty similar to the 56Kbps I had back...
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Master System serial bootloader
Got tired of having to flash a cartridge every time I needed to run a small test program on the SEGA master system so, since I already have a serial port, I decided to make a serial port bootloader implementing the venerable XMODEM protocol. The XMODEM bootloader is available as...
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Bringing OpenWRT to the NanoPi-M2
Recently bought one of the many Raspberry Pi look-alike boards, in this case the FriendlyARM’s NanoPI-M2, a single board computer based off the Cortex-A9 S5P4418 SoC. Out of the box this board supports Debian Linux and some flavour of Android. However the Linux distribution I wanted to use, OpenWRT was...
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New cartridge revision in design!
Having a working prototype card is now time to make a more definitive, more user friendly version of the circuit. This new revision will use the more common cartridge slot, and will be able to program the flash ROM without an external programmer using a microcontroller to connect to a...
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Serial port for the Master System
Blinking an LED is the first step with any programmable hardware, putting a serial console to work is the natural step 2. No one thought about giving the SEGA master system a serial port, so I decided someone had to do it. Having a serial console is by far the...
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Prototypes are ugly
The working flash card built as described on this site is not the first attempt at making a SEGA master system flash cartridge of some sort. The very initial hacks into it were built around a PIC18F44K22 microcontroller with some signals exposed on pin headers to prototype the mapper hardware....
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SEGA Master System flash card
This project attempts to make a programmable SEGA Master System card which would allow loading custom programs or existing games on the Master System console through its card slot. The motivation behind this project has been being able to quickly develop software for the console, especially cartridge dumping tools since...
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Hello world!
Time to put the server to good use! This is the place where I will dump anything I may find interesting or the progress on my personal electronics and programming projects. Hope it will be at least interesting to someone :)
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