Jack Gassett

  • Spin Brushless DC Motors Slowly

    Here is some good reference material on spinning Brushless DC motors that should be applicable to the Papilio. We would just need to add some sensors to spin the motors faster…   I used specialized triple half bridge IC L6234 (~ 8$). You can make the same spending less money (but more time) with MOSFET…

  • USB PIDs For All – New USB PID Source.

    Making an Open Source Hardware device and need a USB VID/PID but can’t afford $5K? Well now there is a new option for getting your own PID for free! Now, someone has finally done the sensible thing and put an unused USB VID to work. pid.codes obtained the rights to a single VID – 0x1209…

  • CastAR Teardown

      If you are like us you have been following Jerri Ellsworth’s castAR project with a sense of awe and anticipation. It’s an amazing project made with an FPGA and we can’t wait to see one of these things in person. Until that happens we found a great teardown video that shows all the pretty insides…

  • Blog that documents work to create Commodore 65 on FPGA.

    Very interesting blog that documents Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen’s work on recreating the Commodore 64 on an FPGA. Not sure if any of this is Open Source, but fun to read. This is a hastily prepared post with a few screen shots of the C65GS display just to give you an idea of what I am working…

  • ESP8266: Full Arduino support now! Use it like it’s an Arduino!

    Everyone’s favorite WiFi chip now has Arduino IDE support. This means that you can connect an ESP8266 via a serial port and choose it as a board type in the Arduino IDE now. Make a sketch, click upload and you are in business with a less then $5 IoT device. Pretty nifty! What’s supported by…

  • HDMI Audio and Video for Neo Geo MVS

    Here is a cool project that adds HDMI output to a Neo Geo arcade board using an FPGA. When he tested the HDMI with his monitor, it was out of spec but still worked. His TV, on the other hand, refused to play it at all. This was due to the Neo Geo outputting 59.1…