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System-on-modules (SoMs) continue to offer numerous cost and design advantages, to the consumer and the embedded developer, both. This month’s gallery focuses on a range of SoMs, from the niche to the broad.
Soft-core RISC-V designs allow you to run a custom microcontroller (MCU) on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This article introduces the higher-performance Ibex RISC-V core, and then demonstrates how it generates similar power signatures to a “real,” hard-core MCU. This sets the stage for future experimentation, since you can evaluate the security of an “off-the-shelf” design, and then add in features you might need such as specific cryptographic accelerators.
Tiny embedded boards—Low-power MCUs have become omnipresent, with good reason: the explosion in AIoT and wearable tech has created a great demand for minimizing energy consumption in virtually every application. This month’s Datasheet gallery represents just some of the great diversity of low-power MCUs available on the market today. complete single-board computers (SBCs) or powerful systems-on-chips (SoMs)—become ever more powerful, year over year, even as they rapidly shrink in size. This month’s gallery features a wide range of teeny tiny board-level computer options.
This project combines a PIC microcontroller, a custom clock source, some simple digital circuitry and selectable output filters. The result is a reprogrammable audio-frequency function generator with resolution from 0.1Hz to 20kHz.
AIRWidget is a device that allows you to examine infrared signals from a remote control. You can see, save, analyze, and display what is being transmitted, with more accuracy than you’d get with a digital storage oscilloscope. In this article, I explain how an AIRWidget works and how to build one, so you can modify or add functions to any IR remote control device.