Gadget Factory

Gadget Factory

  • 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…

  • Building the Papilio DUO Prototypes!

    Check it out, the Papilio DUO prototypes have arrived and the very first prototype is being built and tested as we speak! Head over to the forum to follow the thread as the board is verified. http://youtu.be/oTobDa_Qu3A There are more build videos in the forum. If you are interested in the Papilio DUO design, take…

  • Spartan 6 FPGA in the “Bus Pirate” form factor.

    Rob, over at ultra-embedded.com, pointed us to his new FPGA project; a Spartan 6 FPGA in the “Bus Pirate” form factor. What’s really cool about the project is there is no expensive USB chip, instead Rob uses a low cost USB PHY and a USB core connected to his AltOR32 implementation. A small USB stack…

  • MicroBlaze MCS: Attaching Peripherals

    Following up on the previous blog post about setting up the free MicroBlaze MCS soft processor for use with the Papilio we have Jim’s second tutorial showing how to attach a peripheral to MicroBlaze MCS. In the tutorial he shows how to attach a PWM core to the GPIO pins of the MicroBlaze MCS for…

  • MicroBlaze MCS: Step by Step tutorial for the Papilio

    Jim, a new Papilio enthusiast, put together this really great tutorial on how to get the free Microblaze MCS soft processor up and running. While playing around with the WebPack ISE software he realized there was a free soft processor – the Microblaze MCS. Not a fan of the Arduino IDE and its lack of…

  • Free Hamster Reflow Oven PCB’s for the asking!

    A couple months ago Hamster put together this wonderful project to make a “software-less” PCB Reflow Oven controller. This is a hardware only solution that should be very robust and responsive, there is no software to go awry! As is fitting for a PCB reflow oven project Hamster made a batch of the controller boards…

  • Stencil heaven at Hackvana with the Stencil8 system.

    Having recently been recommended to check out Hackvana.com for the new Papilio DUO prototype’s I noticed a quick blurb about stencils in the Q&A doc. I asked Mitch, who runs Hackvana, about stencils in the IRC channel and boy was I glad I did! He outlined a very affordable and easy to use stenciling system…

  • Hamster posts an FPGA based Eternity II solver. Is there still a $2M bounty for solving this puzzle?

    FPGA hacker extraordinaire, aka Hamster, just posted VHDL code for an Eternity II solver via the Papilio forums. More details and full code can be found at his wiki, and if you are like me you have never heard of the Eternity II puzzle before. Wikipedia has our back with an in depth article on…