#hardwarehacking

OPT4048 - a "tri-stimulus" light sensor 🔴🟢🔵

Solenoids go clicky-clacky 🔩🔊🤖

TLV320DAC3100 first bops 🔊🎶💃🕺

Text mode HSTX DVI output on the Fruit Jam 🔡🖥️🍓

Jepler has been working round the clock to get HSTX DVI

) output support for the Fruit Jam

) working - this mode is neat because its 'text only' - you get 3-bit color text, it does that by creating a 'resolution' of 91 x 30 characters, you can only set the color and glyph. However, the monitor output is a non-buffered 1280x720, with each scanline generated 'on the fly', so you don't need any SRAM. This could be great for something like a Z-machine emulator (

Fruit Jam RP2350B credit-card mini computer with all the fixin's 🍓🍇💾

We were catching up on a recent Hackaday hackchat with Eben Upton (https://hackaday.io/event/202122-raspberry-pi-hack-chat-with-eben-upton) and learned some fun facts: such as the DVI hack for the RP2040 was inspired by a device called the IchigoJam (https://www.hackster.io/news/ichigojam-combines-strawberry-and-raspberry-to-deliver-a-raspberry-pi-pico-powered-educational-micro-66aa5d2f6eec). We remember reading about this back when it was an LPC1114, now it uses an RP2040. Well, we're wrapping up the Metro RP2350 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6003), and lately, we've been joking around that with DVI output and USB Host support via bit-banged PIO, you could sorta build a little stand-alone computer. Well, one pear-green-tea-fueled-afternoon later we tried our hand at designing a 'credit card sized' computer - that's 3.375" x 2.125", about the same size as a business card (https://hackaday.com/2024/05/07/the-2024-business-card-challenge-starts-now/) and turns out there's even a standard named for it: ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 (https://www.iso.org/standard/70483.html).

Anyhow, with the extra pins of the QFN-80 RP2350B, we're able to jam a ridonkulous amount of hardware into this shape: RP2350B dual 150MHz Cortex M33 w/ PicoProbe debug port, 16 MB Flash + 8 MB PSRAM, USB type C for bootloading/USB client, Micro SD card with SPI or SDIO, DVI output on the HSTX port, I2S stereo headphone + mono speaker via the TLV320DAC3100 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/tlv320dac3100irhbt/2353656), 2-port USB type A hub for both keyboard and mouse or game controllers, chunky on-off switch, Stemma QT I2C + Stemma classic JST 3-pin, EYESPI for TFT displays, 5x NeoPixels, 3x tactile switches, and a 16-pin socket header with 10 A/D GPIO + 5V/3V/GND power pins. The PSRAM will help when we want to do things like run emulations that we need to store in fast RAM access, and it will also let us use the main SRAM as the DVI video buffer.

"See" the Sounds of Classic Mac Audio 🔊🍏

We're working on the Pico-Mac port https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam to Fruit Jam https://www.adafruit.com/product/6200 and one thing we really want to add is sound support for classic Mac games and HyperCard stacks.

Triple Matrix Bonnet Makes Big Bright Displays 🔴🟢🔵✨

With our latest work on getting HUB75 RGB matrices working on the Raspberry Pi 5

we can now create stunning LED displays. But what if we want more pixels? At some point, we max out the bandwidth of the RP1 chip, but we can still squeeze out additional performance by updating the PIO commands to output two or three matrix strings instead of just one.

Thus, the Triple Output RGB Matrix Bonnet you see here! We're using the classic Active-3 pinout

with a switch to select whether the 4th or 8th pin is connected to address E.