Gadget Factory

Gadget Factory

  • Free E-Book: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles

    Free e-book for the ZYNQ FPGA, while this won’t help with the Papilio it is good information for those thinking about getting into the ZYNQ FPGA’s. This free e-book teaches all about working with the Zynq SoC FPGA, all the way from the “Hello World” basics to asymmetric multiprocessing and the addition of several real-time…

  • Cx: A New Language for Hardware Design & Verification

    Here is another new language for high level hardware description. We haven’t used it but this article has a clear description of why a hardware description language that goes further then VHDL or Verilog is needed. via www.eetimes.com   Cx (formerly C~) is a new language for hardware design and verification that is at an…

  • First Impression on the ESP8266 Serial-to-WiFi Module

    Very nice writeup of using the ESP8266 $5 WIFI module. What is Serial-to-WiFi? Simply put, it means using serial TX/RX to send and receive Ethernet buffers, and similarly, using serial commands to query and change configurations of the WiFi module. This is quite convenient as it only requires two wires (TX/RX) to communicate between a…

  • SmartMatrix Animated GIF Player

    Nice guide and library for playing animated GIFs on those RGB LED Array’s. We should be able to port this library to the ZPUino for use with the RGB LED Wing.   This guide will show you how to add a microSD card to a Teensy 3.1 to play back animated GIFs on a 32×32…

  • An SDK for the ESP8266 WiFi Chip

    There is an SDK for the $5 ESP8266 WIFI module now!                     The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio, TCP/IP stack, and all the required bits to get a microcontroller on the Internet into a tiny, $5…

  • DIY LED Video Cube

    Now this is sick! Can we make it better with the Papilio FPGA? JAMES DEVITO After finishing the LED Video Wall , I wanted to take advantage of the fact that each panel is modular and can be arranged in nearly any way imaginable. I present to you, the Adafruit Video Cube! Each side has…

  • DCM’s

    Here is another great Xilinx App Note that sheds light on Digital Clock Managers available for Spartan 3 and 6 chips. Digital Clock Managers (DCMs) provide advanced clocking capabilities to Spartan™-3 FPGA applications. DCMs optionally multiply or divide the incoming clock frequency to synthesize a new clock frequency. DCMs also eliminate clock skew, thereby improving system performance. Similarly,…

  • Great news! Papilio DUO, Computing Shield, and LogicStart Shield going into production at Seeed Studio!

      Great news, I just made payment to Seeed Studio to start manufacturing the first batch of boards! They expect to easily meet the December delivery time frame and may even have them completed in November. 🙂 We had a bit of a scare and a last minute scramble due to a global shortage of…