Thomas Capricelli archive
Category: Electronic
October 28, 2026
Announcing Sylphide OS
For the last few weeks, I’ve worked on a new pet project : an operating system for computers based on microcontrollers. There aren’t many yet, but I expect them to be more and more common. Why MCU computers ? You get a relatively very simple platform, booting straight to your code (or almost), and you […]
October 16, 2026
FabGL ported to esp-idf 5.5
FabGL was more or less abandoned few years ago. This interesting project was using clever tricks to output VGA from a good old ESP32 (the original one). It was extremely memory tight. An update of the underlying SDK made less of this precious RAM available for the user program, and so most of it stopped […]
September 28, 2026
Sylphide deltahedron: release 1.0
Few years ago, I designed and built some (IMHO) funny blinking devices, called Sylphide Deltahedron. It was all done and good, and shining around in my lab since then. Though… there were two big “TODO” left on my list before I could consider tagging the 1.0 release. They are now done, and this post is […]
September 23, 2026
USB Keyboard on Amstrad CPC 6128
This entry describes how I managed to connect a standard USB keyboard to an old Amstrad CPC 6128. Summary / TL;DR : transplanting a Raspberry Pi Pi Pico into the CPC motherboard. Keyboard on the CPC To understand more in details how this is done, I must first explain how most keyboards are working. Keys […]
September 21, 2026
Connecting mouse and keyboard to ESP32-P4-PC
As a follow-up to my previous post. The situation is that we can’t use the USB Hub on the Olimex board with low-speed devices such as keyboard and mouse. The ESP32-P4 chip has another USB Host though. It’s only Low-Speed/Full-Speed, and on the Olimex board is only routed to the extension port, without a plug. […]
September 16, 2026
Board Support Packages for Olimex ESP32-P4-PC on ESP-IDF 6.2
This is related to the ESP32-P4-PC board. A great board whose architecture is very close to Espressif’s very own evaluation board. In particular they share the same graphical pipe ESP32 (LCD hardware support -> DSI interface) -> LT8923B (DSI to HDMI or LVDS converter) -> HDMI plug, and the same sound path (I2S -> external […]
September 16, 2026
Beware of USB on Olimex ESP32-P4-PC
I’m working on the ESP32-P4-PC board. One of the interesting features is a USB hub (fe1.1) that is connected to the “best” usb host available on the MCU (microcontroller). That is the one which is “HS” capable, for USB high-speed” or 480Mb/s. There’s another one, rated only for FS, Full-speed or 12Mbit/s, which is not […]
September 15, 2026
Updated howto for publishing KiCad 3D models
By publishing, I mean put a 3D model of your PCB in a web page, interactively: the user can move and zoom. In a previous article I summarized how to do this. This is an update with lot of changes. There are new features: And there are also “boring” updates: Shameless disclaimer: I got help […]
September 4, 2026
New release for Sygeco 1: version 1.3
The most important change is that there are some new games. Directly from the original source. Otherwise it’s pretty boring maintenance, mostly following KiCad new releases. Here’s an overview of the 5 new games. Of course all previous games are still there, i just displayed the new ones 🙂 You can find all information, screenshots, […]
September 12, 2025
VGA output for the CPC 6128
I got this Amstrad CPC 6128 with a bulky CRT monitor. I’m pretty sure ‘true’ retrocomputing fans would enjoy the ‘genuine’ experience it provides, but I don’t. The monitor also contains the power supply for the CPC. Both the CRT itself and this PSU are the kind of electronic that don’t deal well with time. […]