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Turning PC On with a Knock Using ATtiny45 and a Piezoelectric Sensor

Today’s post is something I’ve prepared for a long time. Hardware-wise it’s a simple thing – ATtiny45 emulating a PS/2 device, sending a keypress when three knocks are detected in the attached piezoelectric sensor (or piezo buzzer as they are also called). But if your computer can boot on PS/2 keyboard input and you have your computer stowed somewhere hard to reach (or just want to impress your friends), it’s a pretty neat little gadget! Here’s a video of it in action:

My PC takes a few seconds to put anything on display, but if you look at the bottom right corner, you can see the blue power LEDs light up immediately after the knocks.

What You’ll Need

Hardware-wise this hack is super simple. You’ll need less than $10 in parts and many probably already have these lying around:

ATtiny45. Actually, any ATtiny or ATmega with 4kB or more flash, A/D converter and two timers will work with small adjustments, and with -Os -DMINIMAL compiler flags also 2kB MCUs (ATtiny2313 doesn’t have a A/D but you can either work around it or use a button)
Piezo buzzer and 1 Mohm resistor to act as knock sensor
PS/2 connector, or alternatively a passive USB-PS/2 adapter (I have half a dozen from old keyboards and mice) and USB cable (like the one I used in my V-USB tutorial)
Breadboard and wire. Alternatively you can solder it on a simple PCB like I eventually did.
Optionally, a 4k7 ohm pullup resistor for RESET line, and a LED and 330 ohm resistor to indicate state

The Schematic and Breadboard Setup

The PS/2 part as discussed in my minimal PS/2 keyboard post doesn’t require any other hardware than the ATtiny. The piezo element uses a 1 Mohm resistor like in the Arduino Knock Sensor tutorial, providing a path for voltage level to get back to zero over time. The LED is connected to PB4.

The PS/2 connector also provides power to the device. Instead of soldering a custom PS/2 connector for the project, I took a passive USB-PS/2 adapter I had lying around and used a multimeter to find out which USB pins correspond to the PS/2 ones. Not surprisingly, PS/2 GND and VCC are connected to USB GND and VCC. In my adapters, PS/2 clock was connected to D+ and data to D-. You can see the mnemonic printout I made on that one below, as well as one possible breadboard configuration.
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Minimal PS/2 Keyboard on ATtiny2313

I recently got myself a mechanical keyboard (to be precise, a Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2). One side effect of this switch was, that the new keyboard no longer works with simple passive PS/2 adapter. And the only type of input my current motherboard can be configured to power up on is spacebar from a PS/2 keyboard.

Well, I had read from somewhere that PS/2 protocol is not too complex, so I decided to find out if I could make a simple gadget that would send spacebar keypress over PS/2 when a switch was toggled. That turned out to be quite easy (with some limitations, read the end of this post to find out more).

PS/2 basics

The Wikipedia page for PS/2 connector already looked promising – there are GND and VCC pins straight available, and only two additional (open collector type) lines are needed for data and clock lines. Communication is bi-directional with the keyboard providing clock signal and sending end toggles data line while the receiving end listens.
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Color composite video decoding with Picoscope 3206B

I recently finished an improved version of the NTSC composite video decoder previously featured here at Code and Life. With the bigger buffer of Picoscope 3206B, I was able to capture enough samples per frame to add color. A Youtube demonstration video has just finished uploading and you can view it below.

I already talk a bit about the techniques used in the new version, as well as the new features. For the readers of this blog, I’m planning a more detailed technical explanation, which I’ll put up as soon as I get the infographics for that one done.

Enjoy the show! If you want to take a look at the sources (or better yet, have a 3000 series Picoscope at hand), you can grab the source package. My code is licensed under GPL, see README.txt inside the archive for details.

Update: Technical details now published! Implementation details to be added in another post a bit later.

Realtime Composite Video Decoding with PicoScope

After getting my Raspberry Pi and successfully trying out serial console and communication with Arduino, I wanted to see if I could use the Pi as a “display shield” for Arduino and other simpler microcontroller projects. However, this plan had a minor problem: My workstation’s monitor wouldn’t display the HDMI image from Pi, and neither had it had a composite input. Working with the Pi in my living room which has a projector with both HDMI and composite was an option, but spreading all my gear there didn’t seem like such a good plan. But then I got a crazy idea:

The Pi has a composite output, which seems like a standard RCA connector. Presumably it’s sending out a rather straightforward analog signal. Would it be possible to digitize this signal and emulate a composite video display on the PC?

The short answer is: Yes. The medium length answer is, that it either requires an expensive oscilloscope with very large capture buffer (millions of samples), or then something that can stream the data fast enough so there’s enough samples per scanline to go by. Turns out my Picoscope 2204 can do the latter just enough – it isn’t enough for color, but here’s what I was able to achieve (hint: you may want to set video quality to 480p):

What my program does is essentially capture a run of 500 000 samples at 150ns intervals, analyze the data stream to see whether we have a working frame (and because the signal is interlaced, whether we got odd or even pixels), plot it on screen and get a new set of data. It essentially creates a “virtual composite input” for the PC. There’s some jitter and horizontal resolution lost due to capture rate and decoding algorithm limitations, and the picture is monochrome, but if you consider that realtime serial decoding is considered a nice feature in oscilloscopes, this does take things to a whole another level.

Read on to learn how this is achieved, and you’ll learn a thing or two about video signals! I’ve also included full source code (consider it alpha grade) for any readers with similar equipment in their hands.

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World’s Simplest Logic Analyzer for $5

Today’s post documents my recent hack that may just be the world’s simplest logic analyzer. More accurately, it is a circuit consisting of a 74HC126 quad buffer chip and R-2R resistor network (eleven 330 ohm resistors) that acts as a D/A converter, enabling one to analyze four logic lines with a single channel digital oscilloscope and $5 in parts!

With the circuit described below and an entry level USB scope like the PicoScope 2204, bursts of data can be captured at 10 MSps (million samples per second), and continuous capture rates of 2.5 MSps are possible, the length of the capture only limited by your PC’s memory. This is obviously much better than recently covered Bus Pirate’s 1 MSps for 4 ms!

Even higher throughput can be achieved with better scopes, although the A/D conversion requires several consecutive samples at same logic level, which means that a 100 MHz scope with 200 MSps capture rate should generally be able to analyze logic operating at ~40 MHz speeds. At such speeds, a fast buffer chip and D/A converter is naturally needed as well.

Above you can see an example of SD card traffic analyzed using my circuit – the full capture was 10 million samples which enabled me to capture all the traffic generated by my SD tutorial project without any additional triggering. Read on for details of the hack. A lot of effort has been made to keep the material very accessible and informative to electronics beginners, too. In the end of the article, source code for PicoTech 2000 series is included, and it can easily be adapted for any scope that can transfer captured waveforms to PC (in the simplest form by reading waveforms from a CSV file).

How It Works

Basic idea is to connect 4 logic lines to a D/A converter, that will transform the binary 1/0 values (represented by VCC and GND voltage levels, respectively) into a 16-step analog waveform. Because input lines cannot be directly connected to the R-2R resistor network that is used to do the D/A conversion, a 4-line buffer chip is used in between to provide high impedance inputs that do not interfere with the logic being analyzed.

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DIY USB password generator

Having done half a dozen V-USB tutorials I decided it’s time to whip up something cool. As USB keyboards were an area untouched, I decided to make a small USB HID keyboard device that types a password stored in EEPROM every time it’s attached. A new password can be generated just by tabbing CAPS LOCK a few times (4 times to start password regeneration and one tab for each password character generated, 10 is the default password length). Below you can see the device in action:

The place I work at requires me to change my password every few months so this would be one way to skip remembering a new password altogether (as long as I remember to write it down before regenerating a new one so password can be changed :).

What is inside?

The device is powered with a simplified version of the hardware I used in my ATtiny85 USB tutorial – I stripped away the LCD, reset pullup and both capacitors. If you’re better in cramming components inside enclosures I suggest adding at least a 0.1 uF capacitor between VCC and GND, but it seems to work fine even without it:

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