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FPGA Powers Blazingly Fast LED Matrix Audio Visualizer
[Sam Miller], [Sahil Gupta], and [Mashrur Mohiuddin] worked together on a very fast LED matrix display for their final project in ECE 5760 at Cornell University. Real time! They started, as any good...
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1024 “Pixel” Sound Camera Treats Eyes to Real-Time Audio
A few years ago, [Artem] learned about ways to focus sound in an issue of Popular Mechanics. If sound can be focused, he reasoned, it could be focused onto a plane of microphones. Get enough...
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Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source FFT Spectrum Analyzer
Every machine has its own way of communicating with its operator. Some send status emails, some illuminate, but most of them vibrate and make noise. If it hums happily, that’s usually a good sign, but...
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Tearing into Delta Sigma ADC’s
It’s not surprising that Analog to Digital Converters (ADC’s) now employ several techniques to accomplish higher speeds and resolutions than their simpler counterparts. Enter the Delta-Sigma (Δ∑) ADC...
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Tearing into Delta Sigma ADCs Part 2
In part one, I compared the different Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) and the roles and properties of Delta Sigma ADC’s. I covered a lot of the theory behind these devices, so in this installment, I...
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Swear Bleep Detecting Eyebrows
Swear on broadcast television and they’re going to bleep out the audio to protect the sensibilities of the general public. Swear bleeps are fairly standardised at 1kHz, or so [mechatronicsguy] tells...
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Making a Spectrum Analyzer the Wrong Way on an ATtiny85
Everyone’s a critic, but it’s hard to argue with success. And that’s exactly what [agp.cooper] has with his ATtiny85-based spectrum analyzer devices. The “normal” way to build a spectrum analyzer is to...
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Voice at 700 Bits Per Second
All other things being equal, signals with wider bandwidth can carry more information. Sometimes that information is data, but sometimes it is frequency. AM radio stations (traditionally) used about 30...
View ArticleListen To Your Fermentation To Monitor Its Progress
If you are a wine, beer, or cider maker, you’ll know the ritual of checking for fermentation. As the yeast does its work of turning sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide bubbles froth on the surface of...
View ArticleMaking a Cheap Radar Unit Awesome
[JBeale] squeezed every last drop of performance from a $5 Doppler radar module, and the secrets of that success are half hardware, half firmware, and all hack. On the hardware side, the first...
View ArticleThe Tachometer Inside Your Smartphone
It’s the latest in instrumentation for the well-appointed shop — an acoustically coupled fast Fourier transform tachometer. Sounds expensive, but it’s really just using a smartphone spectrum analyzer...
View ArticleBig Mouth Billy Bass Channels Miley Cyrus
Here’s a Big Mouth Billy Bass with extra lip thanks to Alexa. If you’re not already familiar, Big Mouth Billy Bass is the shockingly popular singing animatronic fish designed to look like a trophy fish...
View ArticleSDR Is At the Heart of This Soup-Can Doppler Radar Set
Want to explore the world of radar but feel daunted by the mysteries of radio frequency electronics? Be daunted no more and abstract the RF complexities away with this tutorial on software-defined...
View ArticlePeering Into a Running Brain: SDRAM Refresh Analyzed from Userspace
Over on the Cloudflare blog, [Marek] found himself wondering about computer memory, as we all sometimes do. Specifically, he pondered if he could detect the refresh of his SDRAM from within a running...
View ArticleA DIY EMC Probe From Semi-Rigid Coax And An SDR
Do you have an EMC probe in your toolkit? Probably not, unless you’re in the business of electromagnetic compatibility testing or getting a product ready for the regulatory compliance process. Usually...
View ArticleFourier Explained: [3Blue1Brown] Style!
If you ask most people to explain the Fourier series they will tell you how you can decompose any particular wave into a sum of sine waves. We’ve used that explanation before ourselves, and it is not...
View ArticleBike-Mounted Synthetic-Aperture Radar Makes Detailed Images
Synthetic-aperture radar, in which a moving radar is used to simulate a very large antenna and obtain high-resolution images, is typically not the stuff of hobbyists. Nobody told that to [Henrik...
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Probe the Galaxy on a Shoestring with this DIY Hydrogen-Line Telescope
Foil-lined foam insulation board, scraps of lumber, and a paint-thinner can hardly sound like the tools of a radio astronomer. But when coupled with an SDR, a couple of amplifiers, and a fair amount of...
View ArticleNumpy Comes To Micro Python
[Zoltán] sends in his very interesting implementation of a NumPy-like library for micropython called ulab. He had a project in MicroPython that needed a very fast FFT on a micro controller, and was...
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Sara Adkins is Jamming Out with Machines
Asking machines to make music by themselves is kind of a strange notion. They’re machines, after all. They don’t feel happy or hurt, and as far as we know, they don’t long for the affections of other...
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