CD Image Via Twitter: A Handcrafted Game Disc
Humans can turn anything into a competition. Someone always wants to be faster or drive a ball farther. Technical pursuits are no different, which is why a lot of people overclock or play regular...
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SMART Response XE Gets Wireless Bootloader
A few months back we first brought word of the progress being made in unlocking the SMART Response XE, an ATmega128RFA powered handheld computer that allowed teachers to create an interactive...
View ArticleI2C Bootloader for ATtiny85 Lets Other Micros Push Firmware Updates
There are a few different ways of getting firmware onto one of AVR’s ATtiny85 microcontrollers, including bootloaders that allow for firmware to be updated without the need to plug the chip into a...
View ArticleWant to Learn Ethernet? Write Your Own Darn AVR Bootloader!
There’s a school of thought that says that to fully understand something, you need to build it yourself. OK, we’re not sure it’s really a school of thought, but that describes a heck of a lot of...
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Show Your Skills With A Bootable CV
It’s a thankless task, searching for a job. You send off your CV, or resume, and it joins a thousand other destined for the round file. What on earth can you do to make your career stand out, and catch...
View ArticleArduino Leonardo Gets A Lockable Bootloader
Security is something that’s far too often overlooked in embedded devices. One of the main risks is that if the device doesn’t verify the authenticity of incoming firmware updates. [Walter Schreppers]...
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Analog Failures on RF Product Cause Production Surprise
A factory is a machine. It takes a fixed set of inputs – circuit boards, plastic enclosures, optimism – and produces a fixed set of outputs in the form of assembled products. Sometimes it is comprised...
View ArticleBoot Your Pi over USB
Historically, booting a Raspberry Pi required an SD card. However, if you follow [tynick’s] instructions, you can get a Pi 4 to boot from the USB port. Combine it with a small solid state disk drive,...
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Official Arduboy Upgrade Module Nears Competition
We’ve been big fans of the Arduboy since [Kevin Bates] showed off the first prototype back in 2014. It’s a fantastic platform for making and playing simple games, but there’s certainly room for...
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Degrees of Freedom: Booting ARM Processors
Any modern computer with an x86 processor, whether it’s Intel or AMD, is a lost cause for software freedom and privacy. We harp on this a lot, but it’s worth repeating that it’s nearly impossible to...
View ArticleBooting a PC from Vinyl for a Warmer, Richer OS
If you’ve scrolled through the list of boot options offered on any PC’s BIOS, it reads like a history of storage technology. Up top we have the options to boot from disk, often a solid-state drive,...
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Arduboy FX Mod-Chip: Now You’re Playing with Power
Traditionally, a forum full of technical users trying integrate their own hardware into a game system for the purposes of gaining unfettered access to its entire software library was the kind of thing...
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DOOM on a Bootloader Is the Ultimate Cheat Code
Porting DOOM to run on hardware never meant to run it is a tradition as old as time. Getting it to run on embedded devices, ancient computers, virtual computers, and antique video game consoles are all...
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Wireless Bootloader Saves You From Swapping ROM Chips
Flashing your code into an Arduino, an ESP32 or any other modern microcontroller platform is pretty straightforward: connect the device through USB, fire up the appropriate software platform, and press...
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Simple Hardware Switch For OS Dualbooting, Thanks To RP2040
Dualbooting your computer can be a chore, the more switching between OSes you have to do – which is why virtualization or having separate computers are the go-to for many. Failing that, we have no...
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Trojans Can Lurk Inside AVR Bootloaders
If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that if it’s got a silicon chip inside, it could be carrying a virus. Research by one group focused on hiding a trojan inside an AVR Arduino...
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Low-Power Challenge: Making an Analog Clock Into a Calendar With a 50-Year Life
You have to be pretty ambitious to modify a clock to run for 50 years on a single battery. You also should probably be pretty young if you think you’re going to verify your power estimates, at least in...
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Getting The Most From Fading ThinkPads
The ThinkPad line of laptops has been widely prized not only by businesses but also by those who appreciate a high standard of hardware quality and repairability. But some think the cracks are starting...
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Using An Old Smartphone In Place of A Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi was a fairly revolutionary computing device when it came on the scene around a decade ago. Enough processing power to run a full Linux desktop and plenty of GPIO meant almost certain...
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Blinkenlights to Bootloader: A Guide to STM32 Development
While things like the Arduino platform certainly opened up the gates of microcontroller programming to a much wider audience, it can also be limiting in some ways. The Arduino IDE, for example,...
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