Gadget Factory

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  • 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…

  • 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…

  • How to initialize a sine/cosine lookup table with a couple lines of VHDL.

    Papilio user Alex posted this gem in the Papilio Forum. He came across an excellent article over at Jim Wu’s FPGA blog with some super easy ways to initialize memory. Whether you are defining a sin, cosine, sawtooth, or any manner of lookup table its super easy to do it mathematically using this example code.…

  • Want to use your Papilio as an official download cable?

    If you need to use your Papilio with the Xilinx tools; such as EDK, chipscope, or Impact there is an exciting new tool to make this happen. For many years Xilinx has been closed up when it comes to any information about how to make a board compatible with the Xilinx tools. They finally released…

  • DiskVacuum project reads and explores Compucolor II disks.

    Jim Battle shows us his amazing project to read old floppy disks from a Compucolor II disk drive. Once a disk is read Jim has a shell, written in Python, that lets him explore the files and contents of the files interactively, impressive! Jim intends to make his system work with other old floppy disk…

  • RetroCade user DKSTR puts up a test track on Soundcloud

    New RetroCade user DKSTR just got up and running with his RetroCade Synth and knocked up a quick test track. Check it out on SoundCloud! Track on SoundCloud

  • Newbies Guide to FPGA by Codifies.

    We just got a tip on a nice newbies guide to FPGA’s written by one of our newest Papilio community members Chris aka Codifies. If you are getting up and running with your Papilio board then this is a great blog post to soak in, he goes over some of the basics in a condensed…

  • Follow along as Alex gets a YM2151 FM Synthesis connected to his Papilio.

    Correction: There was a typo in the original post – Alex is using a YM2151 chip, not a YM2141 chip. Alex, not satisfied with the current crop of audio chips available for the Papilio, is embarking on a mission to get a FM Synthesis chip connected to the Papilio. His target of choice is the…