Gadget Factory

Jack Gassett

  • Interview with Clive “Max” Maxfield the driving force behind the legendary AllProgrammablePlanet Blog

    While AllProgrammablePlanet blog is no longer online it still remains the stuff of legends. It came out of nowhere and united FPGA enthusiasts everywhere, providing a great community to talk and learn about FPGA’s. It ran for about 18 months under the capable hands of Clive “Max” Maxfield who I had the pleasure of meeting…

  • MiSoC (successor to Milkymist SOC) example for Papilio Pro

    Sébastien Bourdeauducq, the creator of the MilkyMist FPGA and SOC, was kind enough to put together an example project of his new MiSoC system for the Papilio Pro. It is a Python based system and it looks really great, check out the specs: LatticeMico32 CPU, modified to include an optional MMU (experimental). There is a work-in-progress…

  • socz80: A Z80 retro microcomputer for the Papilio Pro FPGA board

    Will put together this amazing project that will knock your socks off! Its a Z80 implementation for the Papilio Pro that runs CP/M, MP/M, and UZI operating systems. It’s based on the T80 core from OpenCores and has some great additions such as using Hamster’s SDRAM controller for heaps of memory. This may be the…

  • Nick Johnson builds an FPGA with 7400 parts.

    Well, this is a little bit after the fact, but in case anyone missed it this is a really entertaining project to check out. This was an award winning project in the 2012 Open 7400 Logic Competition put on by Dangerous Prototypes. The author, Nick Johnson, put together an FPGA slice using only 7400 series…

  • Yet Another VGA generator by Offroad

    Offroad put together a cool project that can be used to visualize and debug your projects. Think of it as adding a boat load of RGB LED’s to your project. 🙂 There is full source code included in the forum post.    

  • Hamster uses a Papilio Pro to test out the Logic Analyzer feature on his Rigol 1102D

            Hamster puts together an interesting to read wiki page that puts his new Rigol 1102D to the test. He uses his trusty Papilio Pro to generate the test signals and includes full VHDL source and some great screen grabs from the Rigol 1102D. The Rigol 1102D looks to be perfect for…

  • Animated VGA Shapes – No Framebuffer

    Check out this cool project that Corey Kosak published in the forum: Here’s a project that draws animated shapes on a VGA screen without using any memory! It even includes collision detection. I thought I’d share my third project with you all. I got sort of obsessed with the idea of driving the VGA protocol…

  • MatthewH puts together a simple SDRAM controller for use with the Papilio Pro.

    Papilio user Matthew Hagerty put together a very nice implementation of a simple SDRAM controller for the Papilio Pro FPGA. Written in VHDL, it sacrifices some speed for ease of use and simplicity. After all, not every project needs to use the full capacity of the SDRAM chip. You can read about his epic adventure…