Miscellaneous distractions and diversions.
The Raspberry Pi’s 40-pin GPIO connector often gets overlooked. Typical Pi projects use the hardware as a very small desktop PC (RetroPie, Pi-hole, media center, print server, etc), and don’t make any use of general-purpose IO pins. That’s too bad,…
Everybody loves a big bright panel of LEDs. Way back in 2011, my daughter and I hand-built an 8 x 8 LED matrix Halloween display. More recently I’ve been playing with a 64 x 32 RGB matrix that I purchased…
Can a fast microcontroller replace external glue logic, while also continuing to run application code? This is the third in a series of posts considering the question. It’s part of a potential simplification of my Floppy Emu disk emulator hardware,…
How quickly can a modern microcontroller respond to an external interrupt? Is it possible to achieve consistent sub-microsecond response times, so that external glue logic like muxes could be replaced with software instead? That’s the question I raised at the…
Over the decades, I’ve pared my collection of books down to just four shelves – only about 100 volumes from a lifetime of reading and studying. Because who needs physical books in an age where everything is available online? The…
This week brought some fascinating news for CPU nerds: the revelation of security vulnerabilities in the basic hardware architecture of many modern processors. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affect virtually all modern computers, according to a sensationalist headline at The…
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