Now, over the course of more than a decade, I spent quite some time manually investigating WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs and their clones. Why not automate this? The CH32V003 is ideally suited for this task, as it offers 5V compatibility and high resolution timers with DMA that can generate testing signals and evaluate the response. Continue reading "Automatic WS2812 Characterization"
Building wireframe polyhedra made from LED filaments, using graph theory to devise geometry and driving strategies. Read the article on my hugo blog
I relocated my blog to Hugo due to easier maintainance and more control over content and layout. You can find it here. All articles from this blog have been preserved, although I won t list some that I found lacking in quality.
Combining a deep-depthwise CNN architecture with variable quantization in BitNetMCU achieves state-of-the-art MNIST accuracy on a low-end 32-bit microcontroller with 4 kB RAM and 16 kB flash. Read the article at my new blog location.
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start to naturally oscillate. A fascinating fact is that the oscillation frequency is rather stable at ~9.9Hz as it mainly depends on Continue reading "Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock"
LED-based festive decorations are a fascinating subject for exploration of ingenuity in low-cost electronics. New products appear every year and often very surprising technology approaches are used to achieve some differentiation while adding minimal cost. This year, there wasn t any fancy new controller, but I was surprised how much the cost of simple light strings Continue reading "A surprising…
Going along with implementing a very size optimized neural network on a 3 cent microcontroller I created an interactive simulation of a similar network. You can draw figures on a 8 8 pixel grid and view how the activations propagate through the multi-layer perception network to classify the image into 4 or 10 different numbers. You Continue reading "Neural Network Visualization"
Bouyed by the surprisingly good performance of neural networks with quantization aware training on the CH32V003, I wondered how far this can be pushed. How much can we compress a neural network while still achieving good test accuracy on the MNIST dataset? When it comes to absolutely low-end microcontrollers, there is hardly a more compelling Continue reading "Neural Networks (MNIST inference) on…
The CH32V203 is a 32bit RISC-V microcontroller. In the produt portfolio of WCH it is the next step up from the CH32V003, sporting a much higher clock rate of 144 MHz and a more powerful RISC-V core with RV32IMAC instruction set architecture. The CH32V203 is also extremely affordable, starting at around 0.40 USD ( 100 bracket), Continue reading "Decapsulating the CH32V203 Reveals a Separate Flash…
I have been meaning for a while to establish a setup to implement neural network based algorithms on smaller microcontrollers. After reviewing existing solutions, I felt there is no solution that I really felt comfortable with. One obvious issue is that often flexibility is traded for overhead. As always, for a really optimized solution you Continue reading "Implementing Neural Networks on the…