By Assad Ebrahim, on June 12th, 2024 (139 views) | Enter your password to view comments.
Topic: Education, Electronics, Software Engineering
By Assad Ebrahim, on June 3rd, 2024 (97 views) | Enter your password to view comments.
Topic: Building Technology, Education, Electronics, Technology
We are delighted to announce the successful completion of a tiny footprint high-level computing language for high-speed, low-power, embedded computing on bare silicon (no BIOS, no OS). In terms of size, cost, and carbon footprint, the kernel clocks in at 730 bytes which includes a fully extensible runtime kernel providing DSL (domain specific language) capability for application specific computing.
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If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to Knowledge Engineering & Emerging Technologies.
January 31st, 2024 (4th ed)
When designing a system, what should you optimize? If it is a user-interface or process, you should be minimizing clicks, or process steps. But for hardware-software systems, the answer is not obvious, and a common mistake is to fail to consider the end-to-end problem. This article explores what is involved in optimizing end-to-end in hardware-software systems. The goal here is to minimize the overall complexity of the system, i.e. of the triple hardware-software-user combination. The following remarks set the stage for our discussion:
- “Any [one] can make things bigger, more complex. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Ernst F. Schumacher, 1973, from “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”.
- “The goal [is] simple: to minimize the complexity of the hardware-software combination. [Apart from] some lip service perhaps, no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is of great concern to me.” – Chuck Moore, [Moore, 1999] (For a succinct introduction to Chuck Moore’s minimalism, see Less is Moore by Sam Gentle, [Gentle, 2015]
- “We are reaching the stage of development [in computer science] where each new generation of participants is unaware both of their overall technological ancestry and the history of the development of their speciality, and have no past to build upon.” – J.A.N. Lee, [Lee, 1996, p.54].
- “The arc of change is long, but it bends towards simplicity”, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.
Between complexity and simplicity, progress, and new layers of abstraction.
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TinyPhoto is a small rotating photobook embedded graphics project that uses the low-power ATtiny85 microcontroller (3mA) and a 128×64 pixel OLED display (c.5-10mA typical, 15mA max). This combination can deliver at least 20 hrs of continuous play on a 3V coin cell battery (225mAh capacity). TinyPhoto can be readily built from a handful of through-hole electronic components (12 parts, £5) organized to fit onto a 3cm x 7cm single-sided prototype PCB. The embedded software is c.150 lines of C code and uses less than 1,300 bytes of on-chip memory. TinyPhoto rotates through five user-selectable images using a total of 4,900 bytes (yes, bytes!) stored in the on-chip flash RAM. The setup produces crisp photos on the OLED display with a real-time display rate that is instantaneous to the human eye with the Tiny85 boosted to run at 8MHz. A custom device driver (200 bytes) sets up the OLED screen and enables pixel-by-pixel display. Custom Forth code converts a 0-1 color depth image into a byte-stream that can be written to the onboard flash for rapid display. It is a reminder of what can be accomplished with low-fat computing…
The magic, of course, is in the software. This article describes how this was done, and the software that enables it. Checkout the TinyPhoto review on Hackaday!
Tiny Photo – 3cm x 7cm photo viewer powered by ATTiny85 8-bit microcontroller sending pixel level image data to OLED display (128×64 pixels), powered by 3V coin cell battery. Cycles through 5 images stored in 5kB of on-chip Flash RAM. (Note, this is 1 million times less memory than on a Windows PC with 8GB RAM). The magic is in the software.
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This article explains how to use the Arduino toolchain to program microcontrollers from the Arduino IDE using their bootloaders, and also burning bootloaders directly onto bare microcontroller chips. It covers developing interactively with Forth (rapid prototyping), and moving your creations from a development board (Nano, Uno) to a standalone, low-cost, low-power, small footprint chip such as the ATMega328P or ATTiny85 or ATTiny84. Each of these microcontrollers is powerful, inexpensive, and allows using 3V batteries directly without the need to boost voltage to 5V. Additionally, we describe how to build an inexpensive (under £5), standalone 3-chip Atmel AVR universal bootloading programmer that you can use to program all of the chips above.
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Voice controlled hardware requires four capabilities: (1) vocal response to trigger events (sensors/calculations-to-brain), (2) speech generation (brain-to-mouth), (3) speech recognition (ear-to-brain), and (4) speech understanding (brain-to-database, aka learning). These capabilities can increasingly be implemented using off-the-shelf modules, due to progress in advanced low-cost silicon capable of digital signal processing (DSP) and statistical learning/machine learning/AI.
In this article we look at the value chain involved in building voice control into hardware. We cover highlights in the history of artificial speech. And we show how to convert an ordinary sensor into a talking sensor for less than £5. We demonstrate this by building a Talking Passive Infra-Red (PIR) motion sensor deployed as part of an April Fool’s Day prank (jump to the design video and demonstration video).
The same design pattern can be used to create any talking sensor, with applications abounding around home, school, work, shop, factory, industrial site, mass-transit, public space, or interactive art/engineering/museum display.
Bringing Junk Model Robots to life with Talking Motion Sensors (April Fools Prank, 2021)
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By Assad Ebrahim, on April 12th, 2021 (161 views) | Enter your password to view comments.
Topic: Building Technology, Education, Electronics, Personal File, Technology
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