Friday 22 April 2022

OpenTama: an open source reference design for MCUGotchi !

Last year, I introduced MCUGotchi, a Tamagotchi P1 emulator for microcontrollers, that worked on an STM32F0 development board. Today, I am pleased to announce the support of a new board in MCUGotchi: OpenTama !

OpenTama_Li.jpg, avr. 2022

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Monday 31 January 2022

Introducing Sparkr

Today I am very proud to announce the beginning of a new professional adventure!

sparkr-web.png, janv. 2022

My business partner, Damien Tronchère, and I just launched Sparkr, our consulting activity for startups and other tech companies, to support them in transforming their ideas into industrialized products.

Leveraging our experience as program managers in the development and industrialization of consumer electronics products, in areas such as IOT, Android smartphones and tablets or even blockchain, we offer our expertise at all stages of the process:

  • technical definition of products (software, electronic and mechanical architecture)
  • development and realization of POC and prototypes
  • development of key features
  • production of pre-series
  • certifications
  • mass production

Fell free to check out our website https://www.sparkr.tech/en, and do not hesitate to spread the word and/or contact us at contact@sparkr.tech !

Saturday 28 August 2021

After MCUGotchi, here is PebbleGotchi !

Few weeks ago, I developed TamaLIB, a hardware/OS agnostic Tamagotchi P1 emulator library, that allowed me to create a Tamagotchi P1 ROM exploration tool called TamaTool that targets desktop computers, and a MCU oriented Tamagotchi P1 emulator called MCUGotchi (see my previous post for more information).

Now, let me introduce PebbleGotchi, a Tamagotchi P1 emulator for the Pebble smartwatches !

PebbleGotchi.jpg, août 2021

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Wednesday 4 August 2021

Spreading virtual life everywhere

Few weeks ago, I found my old Tamagotchi P1 in some old stuff I had, and I wondered if somehow someone hacked it. After some research, I found out that the ROM has been successfully extracted from the picture of a die, and that it could be run on some MAME emulator. But I really wanted to play around with the ROM, and wondered if it would be possible to run it on an embedded system, like a Smartwatch or an STM32 MCU based board.

So to satisfy my curiosity I decided to develop my own Tamagotchi P1 emulator !

TamaTool3.png, juil. 2021

MCUGotchi.jpg, août 2021



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Tuesday 23 January 2018

A 3D printed case for the ROCK64 board

I recently bought a ROCK64 board because I wanted to upgrade my home made NAS (I just got the fiber at home, hence the upgrade).

The board is really nice, especially the 1Gbps Ethernet and USB3 ports. However, it needed a casing to be perfect, so, using Blender, I modified a nice Raspberry Pi 3B case made by jayftee to match the ROCK64 board.

Rock64-Case2.jpg Rock64-Case1.jpg

The main changes are:

  • IR sensor and DC IN added
  • Slight changes for the audio jack and Ethernet port
  • Missing USB port removed
  • Size of the casing increased a little bit

Feel free to check it out in my Thingiverse account !

See you soon !

Sunday 15 October 2017

Sniffing and decoding NFC with a DVB-T stick (RTL-SDR) and GNURadio

Several months ago, we got a new coffee dispenser machine at work that waits for an NFC tag before pouring a hot beverage. Everyone has a tag, and with this tag, we get free drinks. At first I wanted to clone it, so I played with this nice and inexpensive NFC reader (based on the well supported PN532 chip), but found out my tag, which is a Mifare Classic 1K from NXP (MF1 IC S50), was not vulnerable anymore to the current available cloning technique. Since I had never played with NFC before, I still wanted to get some data and see what I could do with it. So I switched to a new goal which was sniffing an NFC transaction between the coffee dispenser machine and my tag.

NFC-Coffe.jpg

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Sunday 12 March 2017

Building the OSSW firmware with GCC

Few months ago, I got a Weloop Tommy smart-watch from work. I played with it a little bit, but quickly put it aside, until someone recently reminded me about this open source firmware called OSSW (the corresponding Hackaday.io project page can be found here). I thought it would be a great sandbox to start playing with the watch, but building the FW was only possible using Keil and Windows...

For this reason, I set up a fork on my Github account that has been adapted to build on Linux (or Cygwin) using GCC. It can be found here.

OSSW.jpg

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Wednesday 9 November 2016

Somfy and Blyss protocols added to rf-ctrl

Somfy-Blyss.jpg

The rf-ctrl tool is now able to control plugs and rolling shutter controllers from the well known Somfy and Blyss brands. Regarding Somfy, only the 433,42 MHz RTS protocol is supported, but devices based on it are still widely available. Of course, most 433 MHz transmitters work at 433,92 MHz, which is obviously off compared to the 433,42 MHz used by Somfy. However, it works well enough, even if the range is a little bit smaller compared to what you could get with a proper 433,42 MHz transmitter.

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Saturday 22 October 2016

Home automation with cheap 433MHz plugs, a 1$ 433MHz transmitter, and a TP-Link TL-WR703N router

Two years ago, I started playing around with cheap 433MHz plugs that can be found almost everywhere. At that time, I got several from different brands, from the well known Chacon Di-O plugs, to the most obscure chinese/no-name ones, and my goal was to reverse engineer as much protocols as possible. I compiled the result into a little tool I called rf-ctrl (now available on my GitHub), and forgot about it. However, this summer, I needed to find a solution to remotely control my electric heaters (not because I was cold obviously, but because I had the time to do it), and thought it was time to dig up rf-ctrl with a bit of polishing (a Web UI called Home-RF).

Blue-RF4.jpg

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Sunday 14 September 2014

Adding a fan to a Sanguinololu v1.3b

Few months ago, I completed the build of my RepRap Prusa i3, and decided in the process to add a fan to it.

fan_mounted.jpg

There are several parts that can benefit from a fan, but since I'm exclusively printing PLA, I was mainly interested in cooling down the print itself. I easily found some nice fan mounts on Thingiverse, but I had some difficulties to find the fan connector of my Sanguinololu 1.3b. And for good reasons, since there is none. Well, not dedicated to a fan at least.

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Wednesday 10 September 2014

Enhanced Rovio (WowWee)

I played a little with the discontinued Rovio from WowWee this week, and found out that the firmware source code has been released some times ago.

Several custom firmwares already exist, but I played with only one so far : Rovio Chat custom firmware. This custom firmware integrates some interesting functionalities (mainly a Network Watchdog), but I wanted to add other features, like turning ON/OFF the blue LEDs.

That's why I just set up a Github repository, importing the original source code (v5.03) with Rovio Chat changes on top of it as a starting point.

So far, I also added the following functionalities :

  • Blue LEDs control integrated into the WEB interface
  • Incremental camera adjustment control (from Rovio Chat) integrated into the WEB interface


The repository can be found here, and some nice building instructions here.

Feel free to check it out !

Thursday 4 September 2014

Inside a KORG Kaossilator Pro

The Kaossilator Pro is a Dynamic Phrase Synthesizer/Loop recorder from KORG, and I just got mine this week !

korg-kaossilator-pro-352879.jpg

However, the version I was able to find for a reasonable price is the Pro one, which is discontinued... It has been replaced by the Pro + version which looks almost the same, but offers 50 more programs.
I played a little with it, but soon I wondered if it was possible to upgrade it to the "+" version. After all, both version might share the same hardware (HW) ? It is quite possible since I do not see any real improvement that would justify a entirely new HW revision. Maybe a bigger ROM to fit the new programs ?

Continue reading...

Thursday 30 January 2014

First !

Well, this is my first post on this blog, and I hope others will soon follow...