Author Archives: e8johan

NES in an FPGA

Posted on February 11, 2013 by e8johan

FPGAs are a fascinating piece of technology. Gaming can also fascinate. Merging the two in a retro recreation of a the classical NES means that I have to write about it. Ludde (from Gothenburg, just as myself) built a NES … Continue reading →

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Flattr Experiment Ended

Posted on February 9, 2013 by e8johan

Over the last year, or there about, we’ve had Flattr links at the bottom of all posts on Digital Fanatics. The total yield of these is EUR0.52, or which one payment came from Thingiverse and the other from my account … Continue reading →

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ZX81 using AVR

Posted on February 8, 2013 by e8johan

Jörg Wolfram has re-created the ZX81 system using an ATMega AVR MCU. The system uses a PS2 keyboard, NTCS (or VGA/LCD) for graphics and an SD-card instead of a tape. Looks like a great recreation of the past. The curious … Continue reading →

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Business Scanner using a Pie

Posted on February 6, 2013 by e8johan

We have a large scanner / copier / printer at the office. Large and rather expensive, it carries out some basic tasks. One of my favorite features of this oversized beast is that it can scan documents and sending them … Continue reading →

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All the Way to the Metal

Posted on February 4, 2013 by e8johan

Ken Shirriff has been working hard lately. In two great reads, he presented details from the classic CPUs 6502 and 8085. Basically, what he does is that he picks apart the overflow flag of the 6502 and the ALU of … Continue reading →

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Final Out-Sourcing Posts

Posted on January 31, 2013 by e8johan

Andrew “bunnie” Huang has posted his final posts in his The Factory Floor series on out-sourcing production to China. Read the first two parts here and here. The final two parts, Industrial Design for Startups and Picking (and Maintaining) a Partner, bring … Continue reading →

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Hardware SPI on the Pi

Posted on January 28, 2013 by e8johan

As fun as bitbanging might be, hardware implementation of wire-level protocols can be really handy. Hackaday writes about Louis Thiery‘s and Brian Hensley‘s work towards enabling SPI on the Raspberry Pi. They both show how to get SPI working on the … Continue reading →

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Turn Scrap into Filament

Posted on January 25, 2013 by e8johan

One of the problems when 3D printing is the cost of filament. Especially since you tend to improve designs incrementally and end up with lots of intermediate step test prints that you need to scrap. The Filabot team wants to … Continue reading →

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TI-RTOS

Posted on January 23, 2013 by e8johan

Earlier we wrote of an OS for FPGAs. Today, we turn our attention for a real-time operating system for TI microcontrollers: TI-RTOS. The good part: it is a complete RTOS with support for USB, TCP/IP and FAT filesystems. The less … Continue reading →

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FreeBSD for the Pi

Posted on January 22, 2013 by e8johan

The Raspberry Pi gains yet another OS. This time, it is FreeBSD that has been ported over to the cheap and versatile little board. Expect it to be unstable, but that is part of the fun! Read more and download … Continue reading →

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