Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • HDMI Splitter is also a Decrypter

    Esar’s Ambilight clone that runs on the Papilio Pro is an awesome project, I still have one on my desk waiting to be tested.  One of the challenges is HDCP protected content – but with this awesome hack it is no longer an issue! His amazing custom Ambilight clone got profiled here, and someone asked…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Putting laptop LCDs to use with an FPGA

    And here is another HackaDay post about driving an LCD with an FPGA! LCD panels don’t use a simple protocol like VGA for turning pixels on and off. Instead, the very high-speed LVDS is used. LVDS is beyond the capabilities of simple microprocessors, so [EiNSTeiN_] built himself a clone of an XuLA FPGA prototyping board…

  • Reverse Engineer then Drive LCD with FPGA

    Nice! A Ben Heck episode where he drives a LCD with an FPGA! This project is a soup to nuts demonstration of replacing electronics drivers; the skill is certainly not limited to LCD modules. He starts by disassembling the hardware to find what look like differential signaling lines. With that in mind he hit the Internet…

  • Cyberspectrum: Bay Area Software Defined Radio #1 (Nov 2014) HD

    Hamster tipped us off to this nice talk about Software Defined Radio. It’s definitely worth watching… via www.youtube.com

  • Inferring true dual-port, dual-clock RAMs in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs

    Excellent method to infer a Block RAM memory block of any size in simple code that works for Xilinx and Altera devices. I needed to generate some BRAM for a DesignLab module I was putting together and I remembered I had seen this somewhere but couldn’t remember where… Some digging in google brought this back…