My badge Hack at Hackaday Superconference 2015

November was a good time for many hackers and makers around and outside California who got to attend the Hackaday's Superconference 2015. Power-packed with technical workshops, project presentations and badge hacking , this Superconference was one of the best platforms for the best minds around the world. It was my first hardware conference in United States and I was super-excited to attend.
The most awaited event - Badge hacking started with a blast. Right side of the presentation room were full of people who were soldering and modding their badges for the badge hacking contest. I too joined the group of geeks and started my work.

What did I do?

There were tons of free development boards, components and tools available at the table for us to use in our badge. I took a teensy LC which had a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ freescale microcontroller powerful enough to design what I had in my mind. I had an idea of making a platform independent USB game controller which can work on any Operating System.
Armed with a teensy development board, a MMA7455 3-axis accelerometer and few buttons, I started designing my USB game controller.

How did I do?

Three important tasks at hand were

Read the MMA7455 accelerometer's values through I2C
Auto threshold the initial values
Emulate USB HID Keyboard

Used I2C libraries to query the x and y-axis values from the accelerometer and set the initial values through averaging. Then, based on the tilt of the controller, the ARM controller emulates keyboard keys.- WASD or Up, Down, Left and Right arrow keys. The user buttons emulate ENTER and SPACE keys. The keys can thus be configured to control any game. I also added a pair of googly eyes with blue LEDs glued behind them which glow only when user buttons are pressed. Though I didn't win the contest, the experience left a lot of memories to cherish.

Comments

Shell Scripting to Display Bar Graphs in Linux Terminal

This week was quite hectic for me with course assignments and their merciless deadlines. One such assignment in Advanced Computer Architecture was simulation of various benchmarks in alpha architecture in simplescalar , a well-known computer architecture simulator. I was supposed to run a total of 4 benchmarks with different configurations of cache memory, instruction issue widths, commit widths, in-order execution modes, etc and I had to plot the required performance parameters for every benchmark. A conservative estimate would be around 40 plots! Since the simulation platform was Linux, I could breathe a sigh of relief since most things can be automated using a powerful tool called shell. Scripting made my life easier here since I can automate a bunch of simulations without having to keep an eye on each and every simulation which would take anywhere from 20 minutes to 20 hours. The problem arose when it came to plotting the performance results. Because, each simulation

Programming STM32 ARM microcontrollers in Arch Linux

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the 8-bit microcontrollers were ruling the hobbyist embedded world. But today, the 32-bit ARM Cortex Microcontrollers are so inexpensive and power efficient that there is no good reason to ignore them. Here, let us see how to program a STM32 ARM cortex Microcontroller in Linux environment. The specific microcontroller used here is an STM32F103C8 (ARM cortex M3) programmed in Arch linux. Components Generic STM32F103 board (blue pill) STLINK-V2 (STM32 programmer) Female-Female connectors All the above components can be bought from ebay for less than $10 total. The STLINK-V2 is optional since you can use any of USB-SERIAL converters like FT232, CP2102, PL2303, CH340 and the built-in UART bootloader of STM32 chip to program. So if you already have any of the above serial converters, you don't really need STLINK to program the STM32F103 microcontroller. But STLINK helps if you plan to use in circuit debugging functionalities. Software The

JTAG - Test Access Port (TAP)Controller based Xilinx FPGA configuration using Raspberry Pi

JTAG - Joint Test Action Group is an IEEE 1149.1 standard used in many silicon devices for programming and debugging purposes. Xilinx FPGAs support this JTAG protocol for their configuration. Here I have designed a JTAG FPGA bitstream programmer using Raspberry Pi which programs the bit file into FPGA in fraction of seconds! JTAG physical bus has four lines: TMS (Test Mode Select) TDI (Test Data In) TDO (Test Data Out) TCK (Test Clock) Components Used: Raspberry-Pi Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA (XC3S250E in Papilio One) Jumper wires BLOCK DIAGRAM: TAP CONTROLLER: The TAP(Test Access Port) controller is a state machine inside the FPGA which changes it's state based on TMS input. For instance, let us assume that the state machine is in " Test-Logic-Reset " state. Now if I drive the TMS pin low and toggle the TCK pin, the state machine will go to " Run-Test/ Idle " state. This is how we move to different states. Note

Electronics Adventures

Search This Blog