Gadget Factory

Hacking

  • 8-Channel Homebrew GPS Receiver On FPGA

    Andrew Holme has created a totally made-from-scratch GPS receiver that can track up to eight satellites, all powered by FPGA. Andrew’s creation has been in the cooker since early 2011, and he has been refining it ever since. Pictured above is the front-end, first mixer and IF amplifier of an experimental GPS receiver. The leftmost…

  • Hamster hacks mini helicopter control into FPGA

    Hamster bought a cheap Infrared toy helicopter with the intention of hacking the protocol and he successfully built an FPGA interface for it. He started with Capturing the commands using a IR receiver module but the IR sensor he had didn’t give any useful signal so he decided to open the transmitter and inspect it.…

  • Printable wire stripper lights up when you hit the conductor

    The image above shows an Electro Wire Stripper that might be very useful for all of us.  “For years we’ve used razor blades to do this, as the tiniest wires don’t have a slot on our trusty wire strippers. But often we cut all the way though the conductor (or many of the strands) when…

  • Using FPGAs For 2-Player Space Invaders

    A couple of intrepid students taking a course on embedded systems came up with a new spin on the classic game Space Invaders – two-screen multiplayer!  Using a Virtex II development (FPGA) board and some other gear, they managed to clone Space Invaders and have it run on two screens with some innovative competetive twists. …

  • FPGA Board Used To Parse Data From A GPS Module

    This is a fresh little project we found over at The Carrier Frequency, for using an FPGA board to parse data from a GPS module.  Definitely worth a look, we figured our readers would dig it as much as we did – there’s a lot of potential here. “This is a project that uses a…

  • Open Discussion: Device Hacking

    We found an article on Hackaday about a cool hardware hacking project using the RCA DSB772WE media streaming box.  The article gave us an idea – why not start an open discussion series on the homeblog here?  We’ll start it off with this one.  Because, well, why not? A Hackaday reader found an RCA streaming…

  • JaxHax: Waveform Generation with the Papilio coming soon!

    Do you need an easy way to generate Sin, Cosine, Sawtooth, and Square waveforms? Take a look at this JaxHax video that shows a Sneak Peek at a waveform generation core that’s in the works. It allows Sin, Cos, Saw, and Square waves to be generated at a frequency of your choosing! The frequency can…

  • FPGA driving salvaged laptop display.

    EiNSTeiN_ over at g3nius.org put together this FPGA hack to drive a salvaged laptop monitor. Great work EiNSTeiN_! Many laptop LCD’s use LVDS signaling to transfer RGB information; LVDS is a differential signaling standard that allows longer cables that have very good immunity to EMI. It also allows very high speeds on just a few wires,  in…