General purpose MCUs built in to LEDs emulate candle flicker
cpldcpu.wordpress.com
cpldcpu.wordpress.com
Hey, I got paid to do this a few years back! Here's the result: https://evietealight.com/
They're the sort of thing it's not really possible to show off in a photo or even video. What really gets you (or at least gets me) is seeing these things out of the corner of your eye, flickering, just like flames flicker....
This was a pretty uncertain research project. We didn't know if we'd be able to make really convincing flameless flames. The day I knew we'd got it was the day I brought a prototype home to tune and A/B test against a real candle. I went upstairs to put the kid to bed, then came downstairs and panicked because I thought I'd left the real candle burning. I hadn't! I got fooled by my own product. It was all downhill from there.
These guys are patented (somehow... the language is pretty impenetrable, and it's my own patent...) so I don't mind sharing a little of how it's done: there's an array of LEDs plus optically-active element, which shapes the light in a way that makes it look good. Nothing about this is too complicated (the optical surfaces aren't all that special, but are not trivial to prototype in your garage, at least if you've never done optics before), but there was a lot of R&D to settle in on what looks "right", and the final product has a lot of "premium" touches that really drove up the manufacturing cost. Hence the high final cost -- they really do cost a lot to make.
But they look awesome!
(And thanks Tim for your original article -- I definitely remember reading it during the early research phase!)
Maybe a video wouldn’t convey all the benefits of the design, but lack of video does not inspire confidence either.
i'd prefer a side-by-side with real candle but oh well
Here is a pre-release writeup from Product Creation Studios in Seattle about the development of Evie lights.
https://www.productcreationstudio.com/product-creation-glass...
And, here is a short video clip of Evies “burning.”
https://www.facebook.com/glassybaby/videos/2723369747740357/
The logical extreme end of Moore's law was that you could put a CPU into a very, very small amount of silicon and that meant they were essentially free. (Chips cost by die area & layers). Another article like this is Bunnie Huang's discussion of the ARM CPU in flash chips[2].
There have always been jokes that it is cheaper/easier to use an 8 pin uController than it is to use a 555 timer, and the argument has often come down to the current and voltage ranges that a 555 can work under are different, but at some point I expect to finally see the "blending" of analog/digital chips that allow for a wide range of voltages (on board switching PMIC), and analog pins that have few if any compromises for being either digital or analog.
[1] The Chip Letter -- https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tiny-computers-from-tex...
[2] On Hacking MicroSD Cards -- https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
The irony is that the developments which made dirt-cheap MCUs possible have at the same time basically ruled this out.
Digital logic is almost trivial to scale down. With Moore's Law the compute core itself is indeed becoming basically free. However, IO does not scale down: modern chips have far fewer analog pins, far lower current limits, lower voltages, and are increasingly sensitive to ESD & over-voltage events.
An ATmega32u4 from 2008 is designed to operate on 5V, can handle 40mA per pin, and has 13 analog pins. It's rather sturdy and can take quite a beating. On the other hand, the RP2040 from 2022 runs on 1.1V, although IO is 3.3V. It can only handle 12mA per pin, which a chip total of 50mA. It has only 4 analog pins, which lack a lot of protection present on the digital pins. Basically, you'll damage it if you look at it funny.
I think it's best summarized by a somewhat-recent change in the USB 2.0 specification: originally the data pins were supposed to handle a 24-hour short to 5V without any issues. This requirement was dropped because such a short is incredibly rare in practice, and dropping that single requirement led to 16% reduction in silicon area for the transceiver and a 3x standby power reduction.
In today's world of ever-shrinking transistors, dealing with (relatively) high voltages and analog voltages is getting more and more expensive.
There was a talk at either Hot Chips or ISSC in 2011? about a mixed mode chip where the die was 2/3rds analog parts and 1/3 digital part. Xilinx, the FPGA maker, came out with the "RF SOC" which has a "huge" analog section with multiple high speed ADCs and DACs and analog reference logic, plus and FPGA fabric, plus a quad-core AARch64 CPU. As I recall Cypress had something similar but the part family is escaping me at the moment.
But I am still looking for chip that integrates an SMPS so that they can run on a very wide range of voltages like the CD4000 series did (and still does). Combined with the ability to source 10's of milliamps like the ATMega and PIC chips did (and still do).
[1] Apparently Infineon closed their acquisition of Cypress in 2020.
I believe the linear regulator is implemented as a large resistor followed by some zener diode or something. I assume that's so the high voltage doesn't need to touch the silicon, merely the other end of some not-very-good insulator put on top.
Very small controllers in a high-power device, like on a motor or a LED, don't have this limitations.
If teeny computers are free, and if I want to re-program them for my own use cases and personal applications, then why do I have to still spend nearly a thousand dollars or two on embedded systems development equipment like microcontroller development boards, JTAGs, ICEs, ROM flashers, UART-based bootloading solutions, and other delicate programming interfaces for small microchips, microcontrollers, and tiny computers? And don't forget microscopes to do power analysis for reverse engineering some old toy that was made to emulate or fake a real life candle's intractable flame properties.[1]
If you can't write code, then what's the point? How would no code be an agent of freedom and expression?
Reprogramming a microcontroller unit with a USB cable connected between it and a laptop computer is convenient. But too bad that's not really the standard for old technology and resources laying around the planet, isn't it? You have to basically be uncanny like MacGyver or inhumanly intelligent like Tony Stark to reprogram the apparently free teeny computers laying around the world.
[1]: https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2024/01/14/revisiting-candle-f...
It has been a pleasant side effect of competition in the embedded space that proprietary (and expensive) tooling has become a problem for getting a chip adopted and so there is more pressure to support open source solutions.
[1] Blackmagic Probe -- https://black-magic.org/
Second: you don't need most of that stuff. Dev boards that are a few bucks and debug probes for under $20 are credible and usable; fairly good compilers are free.
> But too bad that's not really the standard for old technology and resources laying around the planet, isn't it? You have to basically be uncanny like MacGyver or inhumanly intelligent like Tony Stark to reprogram the apparently free teeny computers laying around the world.
USB DFU is pretty dang common. It's not the absolutely lowest end stuff, but still pretty dang close to free.
Compare to doing all of this ages ago, where you'd have an 8051 with an expensive, crummy compiler and need a lot more tooling to do anything.
That depends... back in the day, I could buy an (UV) EPROM programmer for several hundred $$. Or I could study the datasheets, build my own EPROM programmer for a fraction of that, and write some software. Guess which route I took.
With uC's it wasn't much different, and still is. Vendor supplied programmers / debug probes etc, are just a quick & easy way to get started.
What is different these days, is that a lot of those 'vendor' tools are (more or less) generic tools, applicable to a whole class of devices (eg. JTAG), often come as cheap 3rd party clones, and with free software to use them.
So personally I don't understand parent's "1000s of dollars" complaint. That only applies when using niche products, outfitting a pro-level electronics lab, or plain doing it wrong / uninformed of the wealth of stuff out there.
Even in 80's dollars, that's a big opportunity cost as a grownup. Now you can buy a $3 STLink and call it good. It's changed.
He said nearly a thousand dollars, which isn't that hard to get to-- but it means that you're doing a pretty wide variety of stuff.
And that's fine.
It's just that for me, on the other end of the spectrum, I prefer a little bit more adventure. Some less constraints. So, I need an "out-of-band" microchip programming solution for my aims.
Outside the kid world, you're required to be more knowledgeable about the way the world really works. You learn a whole lot more with out-of-band computer modifications than if you were to just plug and play some prepackaged handheld programming device into a little chip. You get more intimate with the microchip and its internals. You get concerned about its voltages and current needs, in order to achieve a proper relationship between your curiosity and the microchip's capabilities.
I want to dig into the raw power contained and hidden in unimposing millimeter (or centimeter) wide circuits. The re-programmability of microcontrollers or teeny-tiny computers, specifically.
There is no current documented solution for that. Beyond going your own way in a very long study and practice of electronics engineering and salvaging.
"I've spent a lot on embedded development. In large part, I've done this because I've sought to make things unnecessarily complicated and because I like playing with this stuff. I will deride the typical tools used today by most embedded developers as toys. I will use these views to try and support an assertion that computing isn't effectively 'free' in a monetary sense"
It's not like any of this is that complicated. I've spent plenty of time building my own programmers for things; I've bitbanged SWDIO, programmed EPROMs and micros with a parallel port and shift register or GPIOs on other micros; made pogo pin things, etc. If I were looking to get things done, odds are I can spend a few tens of dollars and just get going, and design in a part that costs a few tens of cents for a whole lot of computing in historical terms.
> I want to dig into the raw power contained and hidden in unimposing millimeter (or centimeter) wide circuits. The re-programmability of microcontrollers or teeny-tiny computers, specifically.
Very little of this is arcane on modern devices. Even a couple of decades ago the "hardest" thing in common use was the need for higher voltages for EEPROM erasure. IMO, where things get interesting is where you abuse peripherals to do things they weren't intended to do, but even that isn't usually equipment intensive-- a 4 channel oscilloscope and a debug probe will get you a long ways.
Anything else, anything outside this standard specification you've shared with me, is where some hardcore hacking goes on, in my opinion.
You can literally become equipped to develop for microcontrollers and have a bunch of boards for less than $50 (excluding a laptop).
If you want to go a bit further, you can get a lab supply and a halfway decent DSO with logic analyzer capability for under $500.
> Anything else, anything outside this standard specification you've shared with me, is where some hardcore hacking goes on, in my opinion.
I've done plenty of hardcore hacking, and ... even then, not really. FPGAs? You can get ICE40 boards for <$20. A microscope is nice, but $40. Soldering iron? Pinecil is pretty great for $40.
I spent so much money on equipping myself to do EE stuff 25 years ago. Now you can do much more than I did back then for peanuts. Heck: I just built 20 little embedded ARM computers for students with LCD, cherry switches, and a debug monitor for $300, and the biggest expense was the blank keycaps. It was trivial to get going. That includes manufacturing. We are spoiled. https://github.com/mlyle/armtrainer
Where things get expensive is doing anything fancy analog, RF, very high speed (which is really also analog ;). Computing itself is cheep cheep cheep.
But a feature rich integrated development environment would be better. Especially if it, both a hardware accommodating and software accommodating development environment, operates on more than just something like the toy ARM Thumb instruction set and its ARM based microcontrollers.
After all, you don't need an architecture like ARM or even x86 to do some simple things that should be as accessible as alternating current mains electricity or sunlight from the Sun.
Computing is cheap, but only because it's easy to clear the low bar for having a Turing machine. Turing machines even occur naturally. Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete and subsequently you can build a computing machine with it. No ARM or x86 emulation or JTAG-ing necessary. Here, it's unnecessary to even summon a UART to USB adapter.
So, although computing is cheap, it's being locked behind some proprietary bars right now. I'm just looking for the keys to free some computers. Particularly I wanna free very teeny sized computers like microcontrollers.
This is about the most common instruction set in common embedded use in the world. IMO not too toyish.
> Especially if it, both a hardware accommodating and software accommodating development environment,
I'm a bit confused as to your point-- you seem to be simultaneously arguing for "more capabilities" but "smaller computer".
If you're saying "more integrated development" -- and mean specifically self-hosting-- the $1.75 microcontroller running in there is capable of being an 80's era DOS computer with all of those tools, etc, self-hosted. Playing with this is on my todo list for the luls. If you just want open-source development, GNU-arm-embedded is built on eclipse and gcc.
If you're saying smaller computers: STM8, 8051, etc, are easy, too. But there's really not a whole lot of reason to design below the $5 point unless you're mass producing something. The developer's time is worth something, too. Having a big pile of RAM to not even think about putting things on stack, etc, is nice.
If you're saying "free as in freedom" (you were responding to someone making a cost argument with the word "free") -- you can go ICE40 and put any number of open source hardware computing designs on it, and control every bit. Indeed, I had a high school class just build microprocessors from scratch on this approach.
But I do kinda need them to be expendable. So designs that are priced at less than $5 is kinda a requirement for me. Because I sincerely believe I'm stepping into new and unexplored territory. A lot of experiments will be done with this information technology system. Which means there needs to be a massively productive facility for having a swarm of microcontrollers. Hence, the need for turning any microcontroller encountered in the wild into a controlled and compliant robot brain for my heterogeneity of devices and home appliances.
I don't mind thinking about how to not bust open a stack that can only fit three variables on it or something. In comparison to the simple architecture which includes parsimonious memory modules or only two registers total, for example, what's complex will be the total assembly and combinations of Turing machine based codes made possible by teeny microcontrollers/computers doing simple things. Like receiving temperature levels and then relaying or sending packets of temperature or heat data to a server. Acquiring x86 instruction sets is definitely unnecessary here. Or, rather, I only need x86 code execution for not re-inventing things like WiFi. ARM or x86, for example, then, should be seen as just an imported (think Python) or included (think C) module.
OK, that's an ESP8266, then. Here's a module for $2.11.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805440432225.html
They're far more capable than you're describing-- capable of emulating an PC-XT at close to 80% speed. For throwaway stuff you could use micropython.
They're cheaper than thinking about how to use random micros you find.
Because of issues with electronics supply chains, often complete boards are cheaper than you can buy the modules and chips at low quantities (things are really optimized to sell a thousand units or more). Even buying blank keycaps at low quantities was very expensive compared to finished products of printed sets of keys.
ESP32 modules are $2 on LCSC and come with a built-in wifi antenna
> So designs that are priced at less than $5 is kinda a requirement for me. Because I sincerely believe I'm stepping into new and unexplored territory
No, your requirements are the same ones that every cheap IoT device has. Open up a $5 smart switch and see how they manufactured it for $1
> simple architecture which includes parsimonious memory modules or only two registers total, for example
What are you on about? Using an unusual instruction set will increase NRC, cost per MCU, and power consumption. Low power ISAs are a scam. Race to sleep if you wanna save resources
I understand why everything uses custom designed stuff for cost, but I don't get why people think it's somehow the better or more "professional" approach to do everything yourself.
Modular stuff with common high level modules is just so much easier to repair, modify, and recycle.
We need an ISO standard for these little modules so we can get back to vacuum tube era level of repairability.
Nearly all modern gadgets(General purpose computers and phones aside) could be made from a common set of 30 or so modules plus minimal custom stuff.
wat
> JTAGs, ICEs, ROM flashers, UART-based bootloading solutions
Dude, all the popular chips these days are ARM MCUs with SWD. They can be programmed with a $3 ST-Link V2. The most you'd spend on the stuff you listed is $75 for a Black Magic Probe, but of course you can build your own for 1/10th the price.
$0.03 MCUs are the exception to the rule since they use proprietary protocols and OTP memory, but their programmers are still in the $100 range
Will be interesting when chiplet technology gets to the point where multiple chips are installed in a plastic package (there are thermal expansion/contraction issues that make this a hard problem but still ...)
the intersil im6100 was a pdp-8 cpu in 4000 cmos transistors, and the 6502 was comparable, but that's with no memory other than the cpu registers. for a useful microcontroller you probably need about 8192 bits of instruction memory and a few bytes of ram, so let's round up to 16384 transistors for a whole computer. an 8051, with built-in instruction eprom and 128 bytes of ram, was 50k. the arm2 without ram was 27k. an avr, with built-in ram and flash, is 140k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
at that price, counts of 16384 to 131072 transistors work out to 0.016¢ to 0.13¢. but the cheapest computer you can buy today is a padauk pms150c https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC... which is 4.2¢ in onesies (and 2.43¢ in quantity) with 64 bytes of ram and 1024 13-bit words of one-time-programmable prom for the program https://free-pdk.github.io/chips/PMS150C. that's 150× more; in the day of moore's law doublings every two years that would have been 14 years, but now it's probably longer. (incidentally this same blog looked at them a few years ago https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...)
ergo we've been at the stage where the packaging of the chip costs more than the computer inside it since about 02009
(obviously the ryzen 7 cpu costs a great deal more than its packaging, though, because that's what you have to do when you're competing on computrons per dollar rather than gpios per dollar. in theory for 2.43¢ you should be able to get 2.4 million transistors, enough for about 300 kilobytes of rom or a 50 kilobytes of sram, or half that together with a 486 or a quad-core arm3. presumably padauk is not doing this because they're using long-obsolete semiconductor process nodes, which is also why their chips are so power-hungry)
Can't wait for us to start seeing authentic 3d silicon tho. Gimme that 3mm^3 cube of magic. And beyond that, computronium.
The difference between “polling” and “busy wait” is whether or not the CPU is doing other unrelated things between samples.
The difference between polling and interrupts is that with interrupts the CPU can halt entirely while waiting rather than having to take those samples in the first place.
The other thing that polling implies is that there will not always be data present when you poll (think of a UART driver), and you might block as long as there is, and you may or may not be polling at a deterministic rate. Sampling unambiguously implies that a sample is always present and handled. It does not preclude any use of interrupts - you can sample with a timer interrupt or handle a sample with an A/D interrupt.
Many embedded programmers of a certain age have a nearly fixed mental model of a microcontroller as a sort of headless VIC-20 and a certain horror at sampling techniques that derives from enduring crummy polling peripheral drivers/handlers from the early days of personal computing.
And here is someone who recorded audio samples (no idea of the year): https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Listen-to-Light/
Edit: and here is maybe the video you were remembering: a video from June 2011 of someone hooking a speaker to listen to the flickering led: https://youtu.be/753-lkao8l0?si=-WqRRuBH644oKTXG But they don't realize this may be an audio chip as the tune isn't really nice or recognizable.
Update 20 Nov, 2009: This additional step was added on 20 Nov, 2009, about a 1+1/2 years after the bulk of this instructable was published.
But I'd be interested what OTP tech uC from the article uses. Mask programmed? Fuse-based? Flash? (and if so: erasable?). Something else?
That day appears to have arrived.
i think typically the thing that distinguished these from microcontrollers like the 8031, 8051, 8748, 8751, pic1650, etc., is that the microcontrollers had program memory built into them, either rom, eprom, or, starting in the 90s, flash. so they didn't need to be booted, they didn't need program ram, and in fact for a lot of applications they didn't need any external ram at all
If the leader got a bus error they would generate an interrupt on the follower to stop it before it executed the bus erroring instruction.
The leader and follower would then switch roles, and the new leader could deal with the situation that had caused the bus error on the former leader.
* MCUs usually have program memory builtin. But then there chips like RP2040 or ESP32 which while considered MCUs are used with external Flash memory chips for storing the firmware. * MCUs usually have builtin RAM. But there are also some capable of directly using external RAM. * Then there are things like apple M1 chips, with a lot of stuff builtin you still don't call them MCU. * A bunch of ARM application processors/SOCs/Microprocessors might have enough resources builtin that they could be used as more or less standalone microcontrollers, without external RAM or flash memory. * some early microprocessors used external MMUs and it took some time until the processors settled on architecture that's closer to how we have things now * early personal computer processors were in a weird category in terms of price and processing power, in certain time period it wasn't impossible that similar microprocessor chip was used both for as main computer CPU and also for peripheral devices.
The microprocessor name in my opinion at this point is slightly outdated. It's not like anyone beside hobbyists is making non micro processors out individual relays, transistors or logic chips.
actually i think non-micro (multi-integrated-circuit) processors are becoming popular again. the 'microprocessor' moniker wasn't coined to distinguish processors built out of discrete transistors from processors built out of integrated circuits; that was the 'second-generation computer' vs. 'third-generation computer' distinction back in the 01960s. what made a microprocessor 'micro' was that it was a chip instead of a circuit board
Though by my definition of requiring reprogrammability and Turing completeness I am purposefully excluding many things that have historically been considered computers, like the many mechanical computers of the 19th and 20th century. From that standpoint I can see how some people might count ASICs as computers, even if I don't think that fits modern usage.
https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html
The PIC12 has 25 bytes! of sram. The CH32V003 has 2k.
https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-CH32V003.html?spm=a2g0...
About that... https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a...
For one, 10 years is a perfectly good used car for somebody, and for two with large EV battery packs we’d expect some lithium recycling effort
Disposable vapes don’t have either of those going for them, batteries go straight in the trash after one charge cycle
Either way, it seems pretty unfair to assume that EV packs will be 100% recycled, while vape packs will be 0% recycled. One could imagine a sort of "core charge" for disposable vapes. Bring the vape back for recycling when you get a new one and get $2 off. This could even be done by law like California CRV for cans and bottles.
I'll show myself out!
It's wasteful, I don't particularly approve of it, I expect to see a lot of jurisdiction ban disposable vapes, but nor do I think it's particularly egregious or meaningfully impacting on the commodity price of lithium carbonate.
https://hackaday.com/2022/05/05/2022-hackaday-prize-disposab...
I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?
maybe you live somewhere without convenience stores
The materials for one EV battery can make ~30 e-bikes, and currently EVs are too expensive for most people.
The way to fix that and the way that industry is fixing it is to make batteries more efficient (higher-density, new anodes/cathodes) in parallel with making a bunch more of them (and mining more lithium).
If we succeed in making a $25k EV, the batteries used in those vapes will be _even cheaper_.
I don’t think it’s desirable and I find the waste appalling, but I do think that disposable batteries can only be expected to grow without intervention.
A typical disposable vape contains about five cents worth of lithium.
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Technical-P...
Make of that what you want, but disposable electronics to administer nicotine seem to be a major waste.
One 18650 can get you several hours of runtime for a pi zero. The battery can cost more than the zero. The cheaper one cell UPS boards are about $2 (plus shipping).
An advantage of single cell UPSes is that you don't have to worry about balancing, which is a bit of a pain with scavenged cells.
Selling consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries that are designed to not be rechargeable, should be banned altogether.
Except when your watch battery dies, you only dispose of the battery, not together with the watch, as is the case with those single-use vapes.
The problem with lithium batteries is that they can catch on fire, but that's a problem only when charged (or charging). A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
No we're not. Disposable batteries should not be a thing anywhere, especially not in products where they cannot easily be removed by design. Alkaline batteries may not combust when damaged, but their internal juice leaking out is damn corrosive.
> A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
Even that is enough to light trash compactor trucks or the heaps on waste collection plants to fire. This shit is becoming a massive problem for the trash hauler and processing industry. One in Australia blames 35 (!) fires a day in the country... no surprise if 1.8 million of them are sold a week [1]. This is frankly insane, and the rise in trash fires directly corresponds with disposable vapes.
Additionally, we need every bit of lithium we can get for electric vehicles and other stuff. Not for throwaway devices.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-02/qld-lithium-ion-batte...
If true, then the hedonism and pleasure seeking (the homeostatic pleasure trap is a monkey trap) found within the big, global industrial complex is meant for a small set of secret hackers to take advantage of by collecting disposed "vape" or smoking pleasure devices for powering some cool nerd contraptions.
Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when you pick up trash. Because capitalism produces treasure when it excretes its waste products.
You just have to be outside the capitalist world-system to do this cool trick.
Just spitballing here, but considering that at typical intersections, automobile traffic outnumbers cyclist traffic by at least 100:1, isn't it more likely that those vapes were throw out the window of a car when someone got frustrated they clogged or something? (I'm not a vaper, but I've heard of clogged vapes being a common occurrence).
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/Y4C_Zjkb9VM/m/scDk_0...
> Killer micros of today are a lot like flourescent lights -- cheap to operate, prevalent, and expensive to turn off. To see a machine standing idle, when you were raised as a child to "use cycles efficiently" is a gut-wrenching experience. Just remember Alan Kay's prediction: In the future, computers will come in cereal boxes and we will throw them away.
March 20, 1990. I haven't found a source for Alan Kay's prediction.
"In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them. -- Robert Lucky"
Does anyone remember this?
My example was all the above except the chip was centerfold in the middle of the magazine. Not on the cover...
I'm surprised this happened more than once however.
Hacking the Esquire e-ink cover
https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e...
Apparently the group that did this advertisement was: https://www.americhip.com/ourwork/?product=product-magazine-...
And they have a whole slew of magazine inserts that they've done. I'm convinced now that I saw one of these magazine inserts, but not the one on the Chevy. Thanks for helping me track it down! I'm really close...
EDIT: I found it!! https://www.americhip.com/ourwork/microsoft-wi-fi-hotspot.ht...
It was this advertisement, I remember the cover. Sorry I wasn't very specific earlier, but I didn't realize how many "throwaway computers inside of magazines" that there were. I guess I assumed this was a one-off event with Microsoft's 365 WiFi cloud (now that I remember the chip, lol).
Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
I never ended up buying one, because it'd consume way more power than made sense, and they're kinda shitty for gaming/workstation use due to low single-core performance and NUMA issues.
I really, really, REALLY, did I say, "Really" miss the twinkle of old school incandescent blinking Christmas lights.
Each light has a metal spring that heats as the light glows. Eventually, the spring warms enough to move and break the circuit, thus turning the lamp off.
As the spring cools, eventually the circuit is made again, turning the lamp back on, and the cycle continues.
And there is more!
At first, the whole tree is illuminated. Then, one by one, the lights begin to blink.
Soon many are blinking.
Then all of them do it.
Because those springs are coarse and made as quickly as possible, there is considerable range in the cycle times of all the lamps.
Finally, the sustained, faster cycle time happens 5 to 10 minutes in. The lamp reaches a steady state, on, off, on, off, that is very regular.
Please, someone model this, drop it in a little MCU and sell us lights that twinkle, not just blink in some pattern.
If I were to guess, there is about 10 bits of variation needed to really capture what the old bulbs do. 8 bits may be enough, if one ignore outliers, those bulbs with either very short or very long cycle times. Those are rare, but do add to the magic of it all.
Thanks, I am waiting.
It's just a panel of self-blinking LEDs. But they're cheap and low quality, so they start off all-on, sort of in sync, then after a while they're blinking "randomly".
So I think you want an LED string built out of lights like these?
I left something out of my description above. It is complete regarding the blinking behavior. But, there is a pattern of tree limb shadows on the ceiling! And light colored walls which really makes for the best experience.
Notice how the panels Big Clive showed us have a steady rolling pattern? The incandescent lights are not that way.
Because each one works off an imprecise thermal spring, the blinking can range from a mostly on, going off for a short while, with short while being a couple seconds, to almost the opposite! That would be mostly off, illuminated for a short while.
Because the variation is so broad, the blinking pattern tends to jump around. One might see 5 lights change in close proximity, then half the tree, with parts coming back on in chunks, to another couple regions blinking off then on rapidly before the whole thing seems lit for a brief time.
The big Clive units have all LED's blinking close to the same cycle.
His varies mostly in the phase. What I describe varies mostly in the period. Some bulbs blink fast while others are much slower.
For a Java applet, it would have just continued on forever with random fuel being added. However, a different application of the 'fuel' for the flame would have had it loop over some period.
The other part is that with animated gifs and a 256 color pallet, one could index the flame color. Roughly for RGB this is step 3 through 0,0,0 -> 255,0,0 -> 255,255,0 -> 255,255,255 (not perfect, but it kind of works for a proof of concept).
And then, the value of a cell is a function of the cells below it in the previous time iteration.
With the fuel rows at some point looping (if written that way), so too would the overall frame loop at some point... and you could have a perfectly looping flame gif.
While that's all well and good, flame gifs are kind of a 90s thing... but my interest in reviving that old code coincides with me occasionally wondering "what could I do if I made a volumetric display?"
Years ago, before animated LED christmas lights were readily available, I hand-made such a string out of ATtiny85 controllers, soldered onto bicolor red/green LEDs, one controller per light. A little bit of C and an evolving animation algorithm recycled from a previous project yielded a pleasing quasi-rhythmic effect. It was absurdly non-economical, but felt like a glimpse of the future.
https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril
I loved this feature on my flashlight and used it exclusively on candle mode. There's a lot of thought that goes into it like PWM speed or direct drive for LEDs that may or may not cause flickering and a tradeoff between battery life and the electronics available.
It'd be a bit comparable to the test and assembly process of the WS2812B, see [0] @ 2:30 or 6:10.
Chips like these only have 1kB of flash - I'd be surprised if you couldn't program them in less than 100ms.
Edit: The site only exists on the wayback machine now, but there was a hate page [1] for the PicKit3 posted on Dave Jones' twitter some time ago
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180423225612/http://www.fuckit...
The flicker effect is based on a linear feedback shift register function to provide a pseudo random effect.
“Reverse engineering” a real candle
https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/reverse-engineering...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08789LJPS
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RBPLRPV
There used to be a company that made 192 LED rechargeable candles which looked like real flames (when behind frosted glass). They have apparently stopped selling them because of all the cheaper ripoffs with fewer LED's and worse algorithms. The many LED flames look more realistic because the light source actually moves, rather than just varying in intensity. They had a bulb similar to the first link above. It's odd that the cheap LED lights don't use a better algorithm, a brownian motion or fractal algorithm with pseudorandom number generator designed for a long sequence before it repeats wouldn't raise the price, it just takes a little more time to implement.
Unfortunately the original post and code all got taken down due to copyright claims, but archive has a copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
I believe it's more like a tenth or hundredth of that, if you're talking about USD.
Doesn’t seem to be anything to corroborate the PIC12 besides a pinout the author has seen before.
Just mention because there are likely a zillion eight pin MCUs with this pinout/ballout pattern.
Is there any evidence it matches in function?
> There are rectangular regular areas that look like memory, there is a large area in the center with small random looking structure, looking like synthesized logic and some part that look like hand-crafted analog.
And the PIC12 is known to be a source of inspiration for dirt-cheap Chinese microcontrollers, see for example [0].
Hard evidence? No. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...
[0]: https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...
Just seemed like a rather large leap to assert based on pad pattern alone. /shrug. Whatever. Not really that important.
I don't like those small LED candles using disposable watch/button batteries. I use ones using standard AA batteries, which means I can use NiMH rechargeables.
That can't possibly be true - unless of them all died in the same accident?
https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/home-fire-safety...
Also bought smoke alarms for every room of the house after that (the hard-wired fire alarm in the apartment was heat activated only I guess)
We have about a dozen of these things throughout the house, running everyday. Some on tables, some on counters, some on the wall in sconces.
They turn on and off on their own. Don’t have to worry about a cat knocking one over. We replace the batteries I think every 3 months or so. (Pair of AAAs.)
Yea, easy, safe way to add atmosphere and ad hoc nightlights throughout the house. Modern marvel.
She then drilled out parts of the core of some large candles using a hole saw, and put these LED candles in there.
So now she enjoys candles every evening without the fire risk, poor indoor air quality during winter season and the expense of new candles.
Seems to be that just about no-one are annoyed by continuous lights. And they can be cosy too. Moreover, with fancy new LED technology (sorry for the slight sarcasm) you can even have it in paper lamp shades, or whatever nicely done Art Nouveau creation you like.