Week of the 08/15/2022 - #31

Contents

tech

• A Logic Analyzer
• Generating Composite Video on an ESP32
• Media Party 2022 - Blockchain for journalists + Cookiecutter

A Logic Analyzer with an ESP32

• A flexible Arduino SUMP Logic Analyzer Library - This is a single codebase which can be compiled for an ESP32, Raspberry Pico, ESP8266 and an AVR. I made it work but wasn’t fast enough for what I needed.
• To read the captured that I used sigrok which allows you to read from all kinds of logic analyzers and testers, etc. For communication the above uses a simple protocol over USB serial called Sump.
• You can capture to a file with the CLI tool (sigrok-cli)

This will connect and get the information from the device:

$ sigrok-cli -d ols:conn=/dev/ttyUSB1:serialcomm=921600/8n1  -l 3 --scan  --show
sr: openbench-logic-sniffer: Probing /dev/ttyUSB1.
sr: openbench-logic-sniffer: Disabling demux mode.
The following devices were found:
ols - Arduino-ESP32 FPGA version 01.0 with 8 channels: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

To capture some data you can do:

$ sigrok-cli -d ols:conn=/dev/ttyUSB1:serialcomm=921600/8n1  -l 3 --samples 1k -o out.sr --config samplerate=3m

• EUA/ESP32_LogicAnalyzer - This logic analyzer is supposed to capture up to 20M but I wasn’t able to make it work. I need to investigate how it captures so fats (from what I saw it uses the ESP32 I2S support but don’t really know how it works).

Generating Composite Video on an ESP32

It turns out it’s quite simple to generate a monochrome composite video signal on the ESP32! Here are some cool projects which allow you to do so:

• ESP32 Composite Video - The code generates an analog signal using the internal DAC according to the PAL and NTSC standards described here.
• ESP_8_BIT Color Composite Video Out Library - The composite video generation code from SEGA emulator of ESP_8_BIT extracted and packaged into a standalone Arduino library so everyone can write Arduino sketches that output a color composite video signal. NTSC and PAL are both supported.
• 7 Interesting Projects that Use the ESP32 to Generate Composite Video - If you’re looking for interesting projects with ESP32, you’re in the right place.

Media Party 2022 - Blockchain for journalists + Cookiecutter

This week was the Media Party: the 3 day event is the most importante news media event in latin america. I attended three workshops that I found interesting so I’ll mention what I saw briefly.

• Web 3 from the basics of wallets and NFTs to next big things - This workshop went through the basics of browser-based wallets, smart contracts, NFTs and other tokens with a focus on the Ethereum blockchain. We will publish content on chain, mint NFTs and transfer tokens. He showcased a couple of useful tools: Mirror.xyz: a publishing platform that publishes to the eth blockchain. Etherscan - shows you all Ethereum transactions and allows you to find wallets and NFTs using “Ethereum Name Service (ENS) Lookup”. Metamask: A crypto wallet & gateway to blockchain apps. I installed the plugin. Eric Mack TW - The person that gave this workshop. Journodao - JournoDAO is an incubator for projects that transform and rethink the journalism ecosystem.
• Cookiecutter - A cross-platform command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates), e.g. Python package projects, C projects. Great and very simple way to create projects from templates.
• Newspack - “Newspack is an all-in-one publishing platform that incorporates industry best practices to help small and medium-sized news organizations produce great journalism, drive audience, and generate revenue.”. The workshop went over the basics of Newspack.