Microcontroller

Todays candles have been optimized not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, the resulting triplet will start to naturally oscillate. Amazingly, the frequency is rather stable at ~9.9 Hz as it mainly depends on gravity and diameter of the flame. We detect the oscillation with a suspended wire and divide it down to 1 Hz.

Is it possible to implement reasonably accurate inference of MNIST, the handwritten numbers dataset, on a “3 cent” Microcontroller with only 64 bytes of RAM and 1K of instruction memory?

BitNetMCU is a project focused on the training and inference of low-bit quantized neural networks, designed to run efficiently on low-end microcontrollers like the CH32V003. Quantization aware training (QAT) and fine-tuning of model structure allowed surpassing 99% Test accuracy on a 16x16 MNIST dataset in only 2kb of RAM and 16kb of Flash.

Flashing a LED is certainly among the first set of problems any burgeoning electronics specialist is tackling, may it be by using an ancient NE555 or, more recently, a microcontroller to control the LED. As it turns out, we can turn any trivial problem into a harder one by changing its constraints.

Builds an addressable seven-segment display module using Padauk MCUs, covering protocol details and firmware.

Attempting to build a LED candle with integrated light sensing using the ‘3‑cent MCU’

Review of the sub $0.10 Microcontroller segment.

Implementing a touch controller electronic dice on an ATtiny10 using PlexingPlus.

How to estimate WS2812 string length by measuring supply-voltage sag from the LEDs’ current draw.

The Nanite 85 ATtiny85 board, a very tiny breadboardable development board with USB bootloader and reset button.

Implementing a stripped down version of V-USB including a WS2812 controller on a minimal ATtiny10 MCUs with only 1kb of flash.

Background and implementation of an interrupt-free V-USB variant that allows to shrink the Micronucleus V2 bootloader while boosting USB throughput.

Implementation of the optimized light_ws2812 driver with hand crafted assembly inner loop that bit-bangs LEDs even at 4 MHz without timing violations on an AVR.

A breakout board for the LPC812 with USB power, reset and bootloader access for breadboard prototyping.