16 ms·

General purpose MCUs built in to LEDs emulate candle flicker

237 points by pontifk8r 3y ago

082349872349872 3y ago
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  That happened way before. RFID cards for disposable public transportation tickets or those music greeting cards.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    At a certain point it's more about the semantics of what a "computer" is. I don't know if I'd count an ASIC from a musical greeting card, though; and even within general purpose devices, microcontrollers vs microprocessors are typically delineated by the presence of an MMU.
    - kragen 3y ago
      the 6502, 8080, z80, 8085, 8086, 65816, 68000, and 68010 were universally described as microprocessors, not microcontrollers, but did not have mmus built in (and of these only the 68010 could easily have one bolted on, as i understand it) 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
      - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
        I believe 68000 could use an MMU, but the catch was that it couldn't do demand paging, just memory protection and virtual/physical translation. I can't find the specific explanation right now, but it's something along the lines of the bus error exception (needed to actually stop the memory cycle) being special in a way that sometimes causes an incorrect PC value to be pushed to the stack. So you could terminate a process on an MMU exception, but resuming it was not reliable.
        tzs 3y ago
        There was at least one company (Apollo, I think) that implemented demand paging on 68000 by using two 68000s. You had one, the leader, running as the "real" CPU, with the other, the follower, executing the same code on the same data but delayed by one instruction. 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.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        That's so clever. What a hack. I'm imagining the slow smile on the face of the person that came up with it. "What if...".
      - Karliss 3y ago
        Arguing about hard definitions differentiating microprocessor from microcontrollers based on single feature is pointless. It's a vague product/marketing category for certain usecases. There will be group of features that are more likely included or not included, but for most of them there will likely be exceptions. And the set of available features available MCUs and microprocessors change over the time. As technology improves both microcontrolers and processors are gaining new capabilities. * 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.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - wongarsu 3y ago
      If I can program it to execute a sequence of arithmetic and logical operations that approximate a Turing machine (with a finite band), and reprogram it at a later date to execute a different sequence of such operations, that's a computer to me. I wouldn't count ASICs, but the PIC12F508 or the 3-cent microcontroller referenced in the post definitely count. 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.
      - sitkack 3y ago
        These RISC-V chips are on the order of .02 to .10 (qty 1) https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html 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=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-CH32V003.html?spm=a2g0...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - mopsi 3y ago
      I feel that the semantics are quickly becoming irrelevant. Many everyday items like sports watches, toys, kitchen appliances, alarm clocks or table radios already have more processing power, more memory and storage, higher resolution screen and better network connectivity than my first desktop. Running Doom on mundane items like key fobs and light bulbs isn't too far away from where we are in 2024.
      - throwup238 3y ago
        > Running Doom on mundane items like key fobs and light bulbs isn't too far away from where we are in 2024. About that... https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a-15-ikea-smart-lamp https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a...
      - Sharlin 3y ago
        Doom on a light bulb is already done: https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/a-smart-light-bulb-running-doom-is-a-pretty-bright-idea/ https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/a-smart-light-bulb-running-d...
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure musical greeting cards are also a thing.
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  The worst offenders right now might be disposable vapes. I saw some sold with effing lcd screens built-in. For a disposable piece of crap.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    The rechargeable lithium batteries in those really doesn't fit the "lithium shortage" and "we don't have enough battery capacity to build an EV for everyone" narrative
    - jdsully 3y ago
      One car has 4,500 cells - bigger cells than most of the vapes. So it really is a matter of scale.
      - exe34 3y ago
        How many cars does one smoke in a year though?
        aftbit 3y ago
        Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.
        wlesieutre 3y ago
        I hope someone who replaces their car every 10 years isn’t just sending the old one to the compactor when they’re done with it 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
        3y ago
- pi-rat 3y ago
  There’s been generic microcontrollers (usually single shot programmable) available for less than 3 cent per mcu for half a decade already. Check out Padauk and similar MCUs.
- self 3y ago
  I searched Google for this recently and could not find it. I tried it again on Google Groups just now and found one reference to it: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/Y4C_Zjkb9VM/m/scDk_08TeIsJ 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.
  - kens 3y ago
    Various fortune files attribute the quote to Robert Lucky. I would guess that it was misattributed to Alan Kay since quotes often get attached to famous people. "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" https://web.mit.edu/~mkgray/jik/sipbsrc/src/fortune/scene https://web.mit.edu/~mkgray/jik/sipbsrc/src/fortune/scene
- dragontamer 3y ago
  At least a decade ago, a major magazine had a disposable chip inside for... I don't remember why. Does anyone remember this?
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    Esquire October 2008 e-ink cover?
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      A good guess but that's not what I was thinking of... 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.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Someone hacked that too! Hacking the Esquire e-ink cover https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e-ink-cover/ https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e...
  - HenryMulligan 3y ago
    I remember receiving this video ad for a Chevy pickup truck in a print issue of Popular Mechanics circa 2015 [0]. When disassembled, it consisted of a screen, battery, speaker, and circuit board. What the article doesn't say is that the circuit board had a micro-USB port which when connected to a computer mounted the internal storage as a drive, with the four-or-so videos it played accessible. I actually managed to find an existing home video video with the correct format (I wasn't familiar with FFmpeg at the time) and when one of the internal videos was replaced with mine (with the same filename), it would play instead. I believe the micro-USB also charged the internal LiPo battery as well, as I don't recall being worried too much about battery life. I probably still have the thing somewhere! [0] https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/16/chevrolet-video-ads-in-print-esquire-popular-mechanics/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/16/chevrolet-video-ads-in...
    - 3y ago
- pietervdvn 3y ago
  I got a server blade with a Xeon processor and 96 gigabytes of RAM for free last week... Granted, it is a ten year old device, but still. Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
  - crote 3y ago
    Yeah, I remember looking into getting a refurbished cloud server instead of a brand new desktop a decade ago or so. They weren't free, but you'd still get a machine with 40 cores and 120gb of RAM for only $400. Pre-Ryzen, it was a very attractive offer. 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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It's the power consumption and the noise that gets you with those.
- crote 3y ago
  We've been there for about a decade now. Single-use paper transit tickets equipped with an RFID-capable microcontroller are quite common now.
  - ezconnect 3y ago
    I used to keep those disposable bus ticket back in 2007 hoping to find a used for it. After a year I didn't find a use for it.
sam_bristow 3y ago
It might be a myth, but I seem to remember the ASICs used to flicker older LED designs were often repurposed from audio greeting cards. The light was actually just Happy Birthday playing through an LED or bulb rather than a speaker.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Not a myth. I clearly remember watching a YouTube video where this was discovered, only a few years ago, but of course the uselessness of search engines these days has made it impossible to find now.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Yeah I think I saw that too, bigclive maybe?
    - userbinator 3y ago
      Likely to have been him, but you have a sibling comment that shows others also discovered this fact, before him.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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  - mrb 3y ago
    Here is a May 2011 post of someone who discovered that: https://www.halloweenforum.com/threads/interesting-fact-about-flickering-led-candles.104046/ https://www.halloweenforum.com/threads/interesting-fact-abou... And here is someone who recorded audio samples (no idea of the year): https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Listen-to-Light/ 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 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.
dmitrygr 3y ago
I hope there is a follow up where the LED is ground down and a PICKIT2 is used to read out the code :)
- joezydeco 3y ago
  I don't buy the PIC chip theory since that means it's either programmed in-situ which seems imposible, or they're ordered with premasked or preprogrammed ROM which is hellishly expensive.
  - crote 3y ago
    It could also be programmed during production. Clearly the LED manufacturer has the equipment to do wire bonding, so why not use the occasion to program it too? It'd be a bit comparable to the test and assembly process of the WS2812B, see [0] @ 2:30 or 6:10. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjhJ9kcaU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjhJ9kcaU4
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      Anything is possible, I suppose, but burning EEPROM is an order of magnitude slower than anything these robots are doing.
      - crote 3y ago
        I'm not too worried about that. The slowest part of EEPROM & flash operation is erasing an already-used page - and that's not the case here. Chips like these only have 1kB of flash - I'd be surprised if you couldn't program them in less than 100ms.
- farkanoid 3y ago
  PicKit2 and MPLAB8 made MCU programming a pleasure. Everything was so damn snappy and responsive. Feels as though everything went downhill with the advent of PicKit3 and MPLABX. 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.fuckit3.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180423225612/http://www.fuckit...
linker3000 3y ago
If you want to see some candle flicker code based on a PIC12F508 or 9 see below. The flicker effect is based on a linear feedback shift register function to provide a pseudo random effect. https://github.com/linker3000/CandleFlameSim https://github.com/linker3000/CandleFlameSim
- huppeldepup 3y ago
  Going to drop this here: “Reverse engineering” a real candle https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/reverse-engineering-a-real-candle/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/reverse-engineering...
  - cmiller1 3y ago
    This is great, I wish I could find off the shelf LED candles that more closely approximate the real thing. I'd also like them to be taper candles on a little holder with a loop finger hole so I can grab it to investigate noises in the night.
    - rapjr9 3y ago
      The best LED candle/flame simulations are the ones that use many LED's such as: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08789LJPS https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08789LJPS https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RBPLRPV 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.
userbinator 3y ago
that probably cost around a cent per die I believe it's more like a tenth or hundredth of that, if you're talking about USD.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  Cutting, wire bonding, and mounting probably cost the rest of the penny.
marssaxman 3y ago
Seems like a small step up from the ubiquitous WS2812, an LED with an onboard controller handling PWM and one-wire communication. 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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  $.032 in quantity...
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    Which is that?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      WS2812B
ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
Some people say software is eating the world but I prefer to say its infesting it.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  DNA is software. The world is already full of software. We're just catching up.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Technically speaking it is a very large configuration file. The config reader runs Ribosome 0.8, which escaped from the lab a couple of billion years ago and infested a whole planet to the point that it became inhospitable to life.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      You left out the preprocesser (RNA transcriptase) which takes the config file and transcribes it, possible modifying some bits in-place, before it gets to the ribosome.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        #defines all over the place as well as decidedly unhygienic macros. Serves them right for still using 'C'. The list of CVEs is endless for that stuff, entire encyclopedias full of them.
kebman 3y ago
I really hate these fake LED candles with a passion. Either put an actual candle on the table, or just put a small cosy light that doesn't flicker.
- bxparks 3y ago
  I like quite them. With LED candles, there's no danger of fires if you forget about the candle, or if you accidentally knocking them over, or if something accidentally goes over the candle. There is no mess to clean up as the candle melts down the wax. There is no worry about wind blowing out the candle. 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.
  - kebman 3y ago
    Yeah, so switch it out with a continuous light instead of a flickering one. Why do you need the aesthetic of a candle light, that doesn't even flicker like a candle light anyway, and just turns out to this flickering annoyance that I'd much rather throw out of the window?
- graphe 3y ago
  Why? Ive known several people that died from candles including the actions of other people's usage of candles.
  - Hnrobert42 3y ago
    Not to mention that whenever I light a candle, my air filter spins up and my air quality monitor says pm2.5 peaks.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >> Ive known several people that died from candles That can't possibly be true - unless of them all died in the same accident?
    - 3y ago
cushychicken 3y ago
Is the actual make and model of the MCU just a guess? 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.
- crote 3y ago
  The post makes no mention of the actual MCU being used, they just note that it's interesting that the pinout matches the often-cloned PIC12. It's one additional piece of evidence hinting that it's probably an MCU die in there, rather than some kind of ASIC.
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    Matches in shape, yes. Is there any evidence it matches in function?
    - crote 3y ago
      Read the article: > 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-mcu/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...
      - cushychicken 3y ago
        I'll take the article's word about the PIC12 devices, but there are plenty of chips from Atmel, NXP, and TI that match that form factor. Plus the whole universe of Chinese clones. Just seemed like a rather large leap to assert based on pad pattern alone. /shrug. Whatever. Not really that important.
rgovostes 3y ago
Semi-relatedly, the best "digital candle" app I ever found was one that just drew an orange rectangle in the center of an otherwise black screen, and animated its scale randomly. This convincingly modulates the brightness of the display.
cperciva 3y ago
Next up: "Porting Doom to run on an LED candle".
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  FWIW Doom was ported to the Ikea GU10 lightbulb a couple of years ago. 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.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
  - cmpxchg8b 3y ago
    Obviously porting Doom to run on smaller and smaller devices is impressive, but I wonder if anyone has completed Doom on one of these ports? That I’d love to see!
graphe 3y ago
If you'd like to see this and more in software for flashlights please visit toykeeper's projects! https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril https://toykeeper.net/ https://toykeeper.net/ 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.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  I'd rather they didn't, I recently upgraded our household flashlights and was pleased to be able to get 3-mode rather than the ridiculous 5 and 7 mode that they were replacing, no more having to loop through 'SOS' and several ridiculous flash patterns, a half-dozen brightness settings and so on to get to the 'full brightness, no flashing' setting that was needed 100% of the time.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Those are the bad ones. If you get this one the only mode you'd get is a ramping effect by holding the button to make it go brighter or lower.
  - rjmorris 3y ago
    Maybe I misunderstood you, but Anduril doesn't include strobe modes on the main cycle, and it lets you configure how many brightness steps you want (or hold for continuous ramping). So it sounds to me like you should want people to check out Anduril, since it addresses the two issues you mentioned with your old flashlights.
danbruc 3y ago
Wait till you have to wait for your candle to boot an off the shelf Linux and download security updates before it starts flickering.
queuebert 3y ago
I would have assumed that nowadays using a small neural net to approximate a CFD model of a flame would be the easiest.
dgsgsgegsgsdb 3y ago
[flagged]
exmadscientist 3y ago
> Is it possible to improve on this candle-LED implementation? It seems so, but this may be for another project. Hey, I got paid to do this a few years back! Here's the result: https://evietealight.com/ 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!)
- deleted 3y ago
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- DenisM 3y ago
  Still rather odd not to have a video on the page of a product where animation is the key selling point. Maybe a video wouldn’t convey all the benefits of the design, but lack of video does not inspire confidence either.
  - declan_roberts 3y ago
    I came here to ask for a video!!
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I love it. I have noted this article for my talk about how CPUs are free. To appreciate that, you have to understand that when the first microcomputers came out engineers were still in "compute" mode[1], we were lectured that you wouldn't use a hard coded loop to check for a switch closure, you had to use interrupts because otherwise you were wasting all those CPU clocks. And computing at the time was often billed in weird units like "kilocoreseconds" (which is the number of seconds * the number of 1024 word pages of core (RAM)) that were consumed when your program ran. 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-texas https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tiny-computers-from-tex... [2] On Hacking MicroSD Cards -- https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
- crote 3y ago
  > at some point I expect to finally see the "blending" of analog/digital chips that allow for a wide range of voltages 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.
msla 3y ago
So is the program of that chip burned into mask ROM (do people still do that?) or could that thing be taken out and repurposed? The datasheet mentions handy-dandy device programmers that plug into your PC and probably mandate the use of a horrible proprietary development environment, but maybe that's only for special evaluation parts?
- wffurr 3y ago
  According to another article on the authors site, linked from this one, most of these microcontrollers are “write once”: https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent-mcu/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...
apapapa 3y ago
OK ... As if there a wasn't things a thousand time worst
Havoc 3y ago
Now it just needs wifi and firmware updates.
perryizgr8 3y ago
Amazing that the tip of a led electrode can now casually accommodate a "proper" 1 MHz microcontroller. And most of the hardware is unused!
shagie 3y ago
One of the things that I've thought about back in the days of poorly looped animated gifs and Java applets was those annoying flame gifs that didn't loop right. A project that I tinkered with (never finished) was creating a cellular automata that creates a flame like structure. 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?"
bitwize 3y ago
Compute is so God-damn cheap these days that it often makes sense not to fabricate a custom ASIC, just emulate what the ASIC would do with a microcontroller. For example, in the case of people who build new, retro style computers, often a microcontroller or two are handling I/O to and from the peripherals like the screen and keyboard. Like there might be an Arduino or Pi Pico generating a VGA signal instead of a dedicated CRTC (because no one makes old-school CRTCs anymore). I just think that's wild, especially when the I/O controllers are more powerful than the main CPU itself (as might happen with a Z80-based system).
throwaway4good 3y ago
Who produces these? And at what cost?
codedokode 3y ago
There are lot of MCUs around us but they are locked down and not reprogrammable. For example, if your microwave oven or a smart bulb breaks, you cannot reuse its MCU for anything else. Don't you think that MCUs must be reprogrammable, resolderable and reusable?
howerj 3y ago
It would be possible to use the LED itself for bidirectional communications (for example reconfiguring it), see https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2003-35 https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2003-35 or "Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs" by Mitsubishi. You could then reprogram the device.
ddingus 3y ago
To whomever: 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.
- arantius 3y ago
  This reminds me a lot of Big Clive's "supercomputer". See any video https://www.google.com/search?q=big+clive+supercomputer https://www.google.com/search?q=big+clive+supercomputer reveals. 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?
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Those look great! But they aren't the same, though I should say those are better than what seems to be out there today. 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.

237 points by pontifk8r 3y ago

Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
That happened way before. RFID cards for disposable public transportation tickets or those music greeting cards.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  At a certain point it's more about the semantics of what a "computer" is. I don't know if I'd count an ASIC from a musical greeting card, though; and even within general purpose devices, microcontrollers vs microprocessors are typically delineated by the presence of an MMU.
  - kragen 3y ago
    the 6502, 8080, z80, 8085, 8086, 65816, 68000, and 68010 were universally described as microprocessors, not microcontrollers, but did not have mmus built in (and of these only the 68010 could easily have one bolted on, as i understand it) 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
    - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
      I believe 68000 could use an MMU, but the catch was that it couldn't do demand paging, just memory protection and virtual/physical translation. I can't find the specific explanation right now, but it's something along the lines of the bus error exception (needed to actually stop the memory cycle) being special in a way that sometimes causes an incorrect PC value to be pushed to the stack. So you could terminate a process on an MMU exception, but resuming it was not reliable.
      - tzs 3y ago
        There was at least one company (Apollo, I think) that implemented demand paging on 68000 by using two 68000s. You had one, the leader, running as the "real" CPU, with the other, the follower, executing the same code on the same data but delayed by one instruction. 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.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        That's so clever. What a hack. I'm imagining the slow smile on the face of the person that came up with it. "What if...".
    - Karliss 3y ago
      Arguing about hard definitions differentiating microprocessor from microcontrollers based on single feature is pointless. It's a vague product/marketing category for certain usecases. There will be group of features that are more likely included or not included, but for most of them there will likely be exceptions. And the set of available features available MCUs and microprocessors change over the time. As technology improves both microcontrolers and processors are gaining new capabilities. * 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - wongarsu 3y ago
    If I can program it to execute a sequence of arithmetic and logical operations that approximate a Turing machine (with a finite band), and reprogram it at a later date to execute a different sequence of such operations, that's a computer to me. I wouldn't count ASICs, but the PIC12F508 or the 3-cent microcontroller referenced in the post definitely count. 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.
    - sitkack 3y ago
      These RISC-V chips are on the order of .02 to .10 (qty 1) https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html 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=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-CH32V003.html?spm=a2g0...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - mopsi 3y ago
    I feel that the semantics are quickly becoming irrelevant. Many everyday items like sports watches, toys, kitchen appliances, alarm clocks or table radios already have more processing power, more memory and storage, higher resolution screen and better network connectivity than my first desktop. Running Doom on mundane items like key fobs and light bulbs isn't too far away from where we are in 2024.
    - throwup238 3y ago
      > Running Doom on mundane items like key fobs and light bulbs isn't too far away from where we are in 2024. About that... https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a-15-ikea-smart-lamp https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a...
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      Doom on a light bulb is already done: https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/a-smart-light-bulb-running-doom-is-a-pretty-bright-idea/ https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/a-smart-light-bulb-running-d...
- Modified3019 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure musical greeting cards are also a thing.
yau8edq12i 3y ago
The worst offenders right now might be disposable vapes. I saw some sold with effing lcd screens built-in. For a disposable piece of crap.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  The rechargeable lithium batteries in those really doesn't fit the "lithium shortage" and "we don't have enough battery capacity to build an EV for everyone" narrative
  - jdsully 3y ago
    One car has 4,500 cells - bigger cells than most of the vapes. So it really is a matter of scale.
    - exe34 3y ago
      How many cars does one smoke in a year though?
      - aftbit 3y ago
        Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.
        wlesieutre 3y ago
        I hope someone who replaces their car every 10 years isn’t just sending the old one to the compactor when they’re done with it 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
        3y ago
pi-rat 3y ago
There’s been generic microcontrollers (usually single shot programmable) available for less than 3 cent per mcu for half a decade already. Check out Padauk and similar MCUs.
self 3y ago
I searched Google for this recently and could not find it. I tried it again on Google Groups just now and found one reference to it: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/Y4C_Zjkb9VM/m/scDk_08TeIsJ 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.
- kens 3y ago
  Various fortune files attribute the quote to Robert Lucky. I would guess that it was misattributed to Alan Kay since quotes often get attached to famous people. "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" https://web.mit.edu/~mkgray/jik/sipbsrc/src/fortune/scene https://web.mit.edu/~mkgray/jik/sipbsrc/src/fortune/scene
dragontamer 3y ago
At least a decade ago, a major magazine had a disposable chip inside for... I don't remember why. Does anyone remember this?
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Esquire October 2008 e-ink cover?
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    A good guess but that's not what I was thinking of... 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.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Someone hacked that too! Hacking the Esquire e-ink cover https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e-ink-cover/ https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e...
- HenryMulligan 3y ago
  I remember receiving this video ad for a Chevy pickup truck in a print issue of Popular Mechanics circa 2015 [0]. When disassembled, it consisted of a screen, battery, speaker, and circuit board. What the article doesn't say is that the circuit board had a micro-USB port which when connected to a computer mounted the internal storage as a drive, with the four-or-so videos it played accessible. I actually managed to find an existing home video video with the correct format (I wasn't familiar with FFmpeg at the time) and when one of the internal videos was replaced with mine (with the same filename), it would play instead. I believe the micro-USB also charged the internal LiPo battery as well, as I don't recall being worried too much about battery life. I probably still have the thing somewhere! [0] https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/16/chevrolet-video-ads-in-print-esquire-popular-mechanics/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/16/chevrolet-video-ads-in...
  - 3y ago
pietervdvn 3y ago
I got a server blade with a Xeon processor and 96 gigabytes of RAM for free last week... Granted, it is a ten year old device, but still. Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
- crote 3y ago
  Yeah, I remember looking into getting a refurbished cloud server instead of a brand new desktop a decade ago or so. They weren't free, but you'd still get a machine with 40 cores and 120gb of RAM for only $400. Pre-Ryzen, it was a very attractive offer. 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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It's the power consumption and the noise that gets you with those.
crote 3y ago
We've been there for about a decade now. Single-use paper transit tickets equipped with an RFID-capable microcontroller are quite common now.
- ezconnect 3y ago
  I used to keep those disposable bus ticket back in 2007 hoping to find a used for it. After a year I didn't find a use for it.

sam_bristow 3y ago

It might be a myth, but I seem to remember the ASICs used to flicker older LED designs were often repurposed from audio greeting cards. The light was actually just Happy Birthday playing through an LED or bulb rather than a speaker.

userbinator 3y ago
Not a myth. I clearly remember watching a YouTube video where this was discovered, only a few years ago, but of course the uselessness of search engines these days has made it impossible to find now.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Yeah I think I saw that too, bigclive maybe?
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Likely to have been him, but you have a sibling comment that shows others also discovered this fact, before him.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mrb 3y ago
  Here is a May 2011 post of someone who discovered that: https://www.halloweenforum.com/threads/interesting-fact-about-flickering-led-candles.104046/ https://www.halloweenforum.com/threads/interesting-fact-abou... And here is someone who recorded audio samples (no idea of the year): https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Listen-to-Light/ 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 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.

dmitrygr 3y ago

I hope there is a follow up where the LED is ground down and a PICKIT2 is used to read out the code :)

joezydeco 3y ago
I don't buy the PIC chip theory since that means it's either programmed in-situ which seems imposible, or they're ordered with premasked or preprogrammed ROM which is hellishly expensive.
- crote 3y ago
  It could also be programmed during production. Clearly the LED manufacturer has the equipment to do wire bonding, so why not use the occasion to program it too? It'd be a bit comparable to the test and assembly process of the WS2812B, see [0] @ 2:30 or 6:10. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjhJ9kcaU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjhJ9kcaU4
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    Anything is possible, I suppose, but burning EEPROM is an order of magnitude slower than anything these robots are doing.
    - crote 3y ago
      I'm not too worried about that. The slowest part of EEPROM & flash operation is erasing an already-used page - and that's not the case here. Chips like these only have 1kB of flash - I'd be surprised if you couldn't program them in less than 100ms.
farkanoid 3y ago
PicKit2 and MPLAB8 made MCU programming a pleasure. Everything was so damn snappy and responsive. Feels as though everything went downhill with the advent of PicKit3 and MPLABX. 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.fuckit3.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180423225612/http://www.fuckit...

linker3000 3y ago

If you want to see some candle flicker code based on a PIC12F508 or 9 see below. The flicker effect is based on a linear feedback shift register function to provide a pseudo random effect. https://github.com/linker3000/CandleFlameSim https://github.com/linker3000/CandleFlameSim

huppeldepup 3y ago
Going to drop this here: “Reverse engineering” a real candle https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/reverse-engineering-a-real-candle/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/reverse-engineering...
- cmiller1 3y ago
  This is great, I wish I could find off the shelf LED candles that more closely approximate the real thing. I'd also like them to be taper candles on a little holder with a loop finger hole so I can grab it to investigate noises in the night.
  - rapjr9 3y ago
    The best LED candle/flame simulations are the ones that use many LED's such as: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08789LJPS https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08789LJPS https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RBPLRPV 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.

userbinator 3y ago

that probably cost around a cent per die I believe it's more like a tenth or hundredth of that, if you're talking about USD.

joezydeco 3y ago
Cutting, wire bonding, and mounting probably cost the rest of the penny.

marssaxman 3y ago

Seems like a small step up from the ubiquitous WS2812, an LED with an onboard controller handling PWM and one-wire communication. 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.

jacquesm 3y ago
$.032 in quantity...
- marssaxman 3y ago
  Which is that?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    WS2812B

ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago

Some people say software is eating the world but I prefer to say its infesting it.

dist-epoch 3y ago
DNA is software. The world is already full of software. We're just catching up.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Technically speaking it is a very large configuration file. The config reader runs Ribosome 0.8, which escaped from the lab a couple of billion years ago and infested a whole planet to the point that it became inhospitable to life.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    You left out the preprocesser (RNA transcriptase) which takes the config file and transcribes it, possible modifying some bits in-place, before it gets to the ribosome.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      #defines all over the place as well as decidedly unhygienic macros. Serves them right for still using 'C'. The list of CVEs is endless for that stuff, entire encyclopedias full of them.

kebman 3y ago

I really hate these fake LED candles with a passion. Either put an actual candle on the table, or just put a small cosy light that doesn't flicker.

bxparks 3y ago
I like quite them. With LED candles, there's no danger of fires if you forget about the candle, or if you accidentally knocking them over, or if something accidentally goes over the candle. There is no mess to clean up as the candle melts down the wax. There is no worry about wind blowing out the candle. 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.
- kebman 3y ago
  Yeah, so switch it out with a continuous light instead of a flickering one. Why do you need the aesthetic of a candle light, that doesn't even flicker like a candle light anyway, and just turns out to this flickering annoyance that I'd much rather throw out of the window?
graphe 3y ago
Why? Ive known several people that died from candles including the actions of other people's usage of candles.
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  Not to mention that whenever I light a candle, my air filter spins up and my air quality monitor says pm2.5 peaks.
- gambiting 3y ago
  >> Ive known several people that died from candles That can't possibly be true - unless of them all died in the same accident?
  - 3y ago

cushychicken 3y ago

Is the actual make and model of the MCU just a guess? 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.

crote 3y ago
The post makes no mention of the actual MCU being used, they just note that it's interesting that the pinout matches the often-cloned PIC12. It's one additional piece of evidence hinting that it's probably an MCU die in there, rather than some kind of ASIC.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  Matches in shape, yes. Is there any evidence it matches in function?
  - crote 3y ago
    Read the article: > 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-mcu/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...
    - cushychicken 3y ago
      I'll take the article's word about the PIC12 devices, but there are plenty of chips from Atmel, NXP, and TI that match that form factor. Plus the whole universe of Chinese clones. Just seemed like a rather large leap to assert based on pad pattern alone. /shrug. Whatever. Not really that important.

rgovostes 3y ago

Semi-relatedly, the best "digital candle" app I ever found was one that just drew an orange rectangle in the center of an otherwise black screen, and animated its scale randomly. This convincingly modulates the brightness of the display.

cperciva 3y ago

Next up: "Porting Doom to run on an LED candle".

semi-extrinsic 3y ago
FWIW Doom was ported to the Ikea GU10 lightbulb a couple of years ago. 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.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
- cmpxchg8b 3y ago
  Obviously porting Doom to run on smaller and smaller devices is impressive, but I wonder if anyone has completed Doom on one of these ports? That I’d love to see!

graphe 3y ago

If you'd like to see this and more in software for flashlights please visit toykeeper's projects! https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril https://toykeeper.net/ https://toykeeper.net/ 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.

NikkiA 3y ago
I'd rather they didn't, I recently upgraded our household flashlights and was pleased to be able to get 3-mode rather than the ridiculous 5 and 7 mode that they were replacing, no more having to loop through 'SOS' and several ridiculous flash patterns, a half-dozen brightness settings and so on to get to the 'full brightness, no flashing' setting that was needed 100% of the time.
- graphe 3y ago
  Those are the bad ones. If you get this one the only mode you'd get is a ramping effect by holding the button to make it go brighter or lower.
- rjmorris 3y ago
  Maybe I misunderstood you, but Anduril doesn't include strobe modes on the main cycle, and it lets you configure how many brightness steps you want (or hold for continuous ramping). So it sounds to me like you should want people to check out Anduril, since it addresses the two issues you mentioned with your old flashlights.

danbruc 3y ago

Wait till you have to wait for your candle to boot an off the shelf Linux and download security updates before it starts flickering.

queuebert 3y ago

I would have assumed that nowadays using a small neural net to approximate a CFD model of a flame would be the easiest.

dgsgsgegsgsdb 3y ago

[flagged]

exmadscientist 3y ago

> Is it possible to improve on this candle-LED implementation? It seems so, but this may be for another project. Hey, I got paid to do this a few years back! Here's the result: https://evietealight.com/ 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!)

deleted 3y ago
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DenisM 3y ago
Still rather odd not to have a video on the page of a product where animation is the key selling point. Maybe a video wouldn’t convey all the benefits of the design, but lack of video does not inspire confidence either.
- declan_roberts 3y ago
  I came here to ask for a video!!

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I love it. I have noted this article for my talk about how CPUs are free. To appreciate that, you have to understand that when the first microcomputers came out engineers were still in "compute" mode[1], we were lectured that you wouldn't use a hard coded loop to check for a switch closure, you had to use interrupts because otherwise you were wasting all those CPU clocks. And computing at the time was often billed in weird units like "kilocoreseconds" (which is the number of seconds * the number of 1024 word pages of core (RAM)) that were consumed when your program ran. 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-texas https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tiny-computers-from-tex... [2] On Hacking MicroSD Cards -- https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

crote 3y ago
> at some point I expect to finally see the "blending" of analog/digital chips that allow for a wide range of voltages 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.

msla 3y ago

So is the program of that chip burned into mask ROM (do people still do that?) or could that thing be taken out and repurposed? The datasheet mentions handy-dandy device programmers that plug into your PC and probably mandate the use of a horrible proprietary development environment, but maybe that's only for special evaluation parts?

wffurr 3y ago
According to another article on the authors site, linked from this one, most of these microcontrollers are “write once”: https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent-mcu/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...

apapapa 3y ago

OK ... As if there a wasn't things a thousand time worst

Havoc 3y ago

Now it just needs wifi and firmware updates.

perryizgr8 3y ago

Amazing that the tip of a led electrode can now casually accommodate a "proper" 1 MHz microcontroller. And most of the hardware is unused!

shagie 3y ago

One of the things that I've thought about back in the days of poorly looped animated gifs and Java applets was those annoying flame gifs that didn't loop right. A project that I tinkered with (never finished) was creating a cellular automata that creates a flame like structure. 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?"

bitwize 3y ago

Compute is so God-damn cheap these days that it often makes sense not to fabricate a custom ASIC, just emulate what the ASIC would do with a microcontroller. For example, in the case of people who build new, retro style computers, often a microcontroller or two are handling I/O to and from the peripherals like the screen and keyboard. Like there might be an Arduino or Pi Pico generating a VGA signal instead of a dedicated CRTC (because no one makes old-school CRTCs anymore). I just think that's wild, especially when the I/O controllers are more powerful than the main CPU itself (as might happen with a Z80-based system).

throwaway4good 3y ago

Who produces these? And at what cost?

codedokode 3y ago

There are lot of MCUs around us but they are locked down and not reprogrammable. For example, if your microwave oven or a smart bulb breaks, you cannot reuse its MCU for anything else. Don't you think that MCUs must be reprogrammable, resolderable and reusable?

howerj 3y ago

It would be possible to use the LED itself for bidirectional communications (for example reconfiguring it), see https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2003-35 https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2003-35 or "Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs" by Mitsubishi. You could then reprogram the device.

ddingus 3y ago

To whomever: 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.

arantius 3y ago
This reminds me a lot of Big Clive's "supercomputer". See any video https://www.google.com/search?q=big+clive+supercomputer https://www.google.com/search?q=big+clive+supercomputer reveals. 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?
- ddingus 3y ago
  Those look great! But they aren't the same, though I should say those are better than what seems to be out there today. 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.