How a microcontroller the size of a postage stamp can name, find, and resolve everything on your network. Names are the quiet superpower of networks Every time you type a web address, an invisible conversation happens. Your device asks, “Where does this name live?” and somebody answers with a number. Read more
Your PC has no WiFi, or its WiFi card is flaky, or you just want a cheap, hackable network adapter. You probably have an ESP32-S3 or a Pico 2 W in a drawer. TinyWifiDongle turns it into a USB WiFi dongle: #include “TinyWifiDongle.h” TinyWifiDongle dongle; void setup() { dongle.begin(“ssid”, “password”); Read more
Every microcontroller project that logs data, schedules actions or shows a clock eventually needs to know the time. Getting it right is surprisingly hard: internal clocks drift, RTC modules need to be set, and NTP needs internet access, which you often don’t have in the field, in a workshop or Read more
“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” — Ray Cummings Every microcontroller has a heartbeat. A quartz crystal vibrates millions of times per second, a counter ticks upward, and the board always knows how long it has been since it woke up. But ask a freshly powered ESP32 Read more
If you want to run a TensorFlow Lite model on an Arduino today, you quickly find that there is no obvious answer. There used to be one: Google’s official Arduino package, Arduino_TensorFlowLite, built from tflite-micro-arduino-examples. That package has not been updated for a long time, and I think it is Read more
Remember the screeching of the dial-up modem? Turning data into sound is still one of the simplest ways to connect devices: you can use an audio cable, send it from a speaker to a microphone, put it on a telephone line or a radio, or just store it in a Read more
If you look for speech recognition examples for microcontrollers, you almost always end up with wake word detection or keyword spotting: the micro_speech example of TensorFlow Lite Micro, which recognizes “yes” and “no”; Espressif’s ESP-SR with WakeNet for the wake word and MultiNet for a list of commands; keyword spotting Read more
If you have ever streamed video from an ESP32, you have most likely used the CameraWebServer example: the camera delivers JPEG images, which the web server pushes one after the other to the browser. This works, but there is no sound, the bandwidth is high, and the result is not Read more
Why a tiny FPGA? I spend most of my time making microcontrollers do audio, graphics and machine learning, and I keep hitting the same wall: the CPU is too slow for the heavy inner loop. So I bought a cheap Sipeed Tang Nano 20K to see how far a hobby Read more
To produce the most natural-sounding speech, modern Text-To-Speach (TTS) systems rely on neural networks. TinyTTS is a proof of concept: It asks whether a VITS-style neural TTS model can run on a microcontroller at all. It is a header-only C++ port of tiny-tts. The model has about 1.6M parameters. It Read more