Disposing of defective appliances is common practice and repairing them is often uneconomical. However, there are often still very useful components in such devices. I took a closer look at a Thermomix and found a nice motor control unit. Thermomix The Thermomix is a food processor from the German Vorwerk Group based in Wuppertal close…
In the last blog-post I discussed developing retro-apps for Windows that can be run under OS/2 using the WLO toolset from Microsoft. But what about native coding under OS/2 directly? Since 2003 I’m coding software for lot of different target-systems, like microcontrollers (started with Atmel Studio 4 and the Atmel AT90S2313), personal computers (Borland Delphi…
Retrocomputing with real hardware is a very nice way to understand how modern computers have learned to run and talk. I developed some GUI for OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Windows 3.11 to control some of my microcontroller-projects. Windows 3.x and the Win16-API To develop a GUI for a modern computer, you can make use of…
Ethernet on Microcontrollers is available without problems: using FreeRTOS or the Arduino-libs is always a good start. But for FPGAs? I was shocked how expensive Ethernet is for FPGAs – but I found a good solution… In 1997 I bought my first NE2000-compatible ISA-Ethernet-Card for my Windows 95 computer. Why? Well, not that my 13-year-old…
Without the possibility to adjust the volume of individual frequency bands within an audio signal, modern audio would not sound the same. Today I’d like to show how I’ve implemented a EQ within my FPGA audio-mixer. In this blog-post I won’t describe the general idea of an EQ, because there are more capable persons available…
Based on my Audioplayer-project I developed a DIY card for the Behringer X32. In addition to the youtube-video here you will find some more detailed information about this project and the implementation. Definition of reverse-engineering by Elliot J. Chikofsky: “Reverse-engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to identify the system’s components and their interrelationships…
Implementing an audio-compression-algorithm in pure logic is a bit challenging as it uses a division. Time for some deep-diving into audio DSP with VHDL. Background As I’ve started implementing logic for the FPGA-Audiomixer, first I had not planned to implement more enhanced audio-functions. My primary goal was to understand how a volume-control could be done…
Plug&Play is a mystery to you? Until recently it was for me too, but let’s take a look at the PCI specifications and lift the fog of mystery about PnP. Plug&Play Christmas 1994 my family and me got the first computer: an Intel 486Dx4-100 with 16MB RAM and a 534MB harddisk-drive. The only expansion-card was…
Todays digital-mixing-consoles are offering high number of audio-channels for processing. I was curious of how modern devices are dealing with realtime digital audio-data and had a look into some of these protocols. I2S, TDM and UltraNet Even if you are not working with professional audio-equipment, at least one of the following systems has been used…
Using an Arduino MKR Vidor4000 board I created a realtime multi-channel audiomixer with nice audio-processing-features. General background Sure, digital logic has ones and zeros – but in the right order these two states can have an impact on your sound. I wanted to know how digital logic can be used to change the volume and…
