Hackaday Newsletter 0xAB

The $0.03 Microcontroller, and Why You Should Care [Hackaday] Twenty Five Years Since The End Of Commodore [Read article now »]( Why We Hack The Cheap Stuff By [Elliot Williams]( This week we featured an [article on programming a microcontroller that can be sourced for $3.40 per lot of 100](. That's right, $0.034 per. Now, you make some compromises to get a computer brain under a nickel, but still you get six GPIOs, wake up, a PWM generator, some timers, a comparator, 64 bytes (!) of RAM, and a spacious 2 kB of program memory. The catch? It's one-time-programmable. But if you mess up, you're only out a few coppers. particular chip, unlike the [relatively expensive $0.35 CH552 that we featured recently]( doesn't have an open source toolchain. (And it doesn't do USB either. You get a lot of extra functionality for the extra 30 cents.) So why would we care? If you're making a project or two, you'd certainly spend orders of magnitude more time working around this chip's limitations in toolchains, documentation, or silicon comfort. I'll give you two reasons why you should be interested in the cheap chips, even if your weapon of choice for one-off prototypes is something significantly more luxurious. First off, with the price so low, it enables not just quantitatively but also qualitatively different applications. The canonical 555-beater comes to mind, but you could easily afford to assign one of these to an LED array, adding smarts to something formerly dumb. If you can figure out an inter-chip protocol, you could make some interesting swarm art. But secondly, these and other super cheap chips always work their way into all sorts of devices. [Take the STM8]( it's found in power supplies, soldering irons, BLDC motor controllers, and more. If you can re-flash the firmware, you can control the device. For instance, a $5 cheapo fixed-voltage power supply unit can become a [programmable dynamic power supply]( with just a little firmware. Even if you don't need to count pennies in your projects, it's a worthy investment for the larger hacker community to figure out how these little beasties work. Because of their ubiquity, the ability to repurpose the cheapest of microcontrollers will enable countless hacks. And that's priceless. From The Blog [Make That Special Cup Of Coffee By Completely Tweaking The Coffee Machine]( By [Maya Posch]( When your coffee machine has a UART port on the back, there's only one thing to do. Take the machine over, and connect it to the network! [Read more »]( [The Stratolaunch Is Flying, But Can It Do Cargo?]( By [Brian Benchoff]( The world’s largest aircraft is flying. Stratolaunch took to the skies in test flights leading up to its main mission to take rockets up to 20,000 feet. Can it do more? [Read more »]( [Teardown: Refuel Propane Tank Monitor]( By [Tom Nardi]( Tom tears down something he expects to be trash. It turns out to be a marvel of engineering. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast EP17]( By [Hackaday Editors]( Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk 3D printing food, retro gaming, and Android bike computers. [Read more »]( If You Missed It [A Raspberry Pi is a Hardware Hacker’s Swiss Army Knife]( [Raspberry Pi Becomes The Encrypted Password Keeper You Need]( [This Owner Took Control Of Their Proprietary Alarm System]( [3D Printer Becomes Soldering Robot]( [FemtoBeacon Is A Tiny ESP32 Coin-Shaped Dev Board]( [Parasite ATtiny Resets Your ESP32 for You]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( SupplyFrame, Inc · 61 South Fair Oaks Avenue · Suite 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105 · USA