Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • 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.…

  • Piano Hero, touch without a touchscreen!

    Today we got an exciting project that we want to share with you. A group of students at the Cornell University have developed a virtual piano system that allows the user to play piano on the screen, I know you are thinking that there is nothing special here but what if I tell you that…

  • Music Synthesizer – Beat Programmable Gate Array

    Check out this amazing FPGA project from Cornell University students. The music lovers created a synthesizer sequencer in their final year project at Cornell university, the project was inspired by other musical pads like Monome and Sembeo. They gave the name of their device is BPGA (Beat Programmable Gate Array); It has some improved features…

  • Fun with PCI Express – Xilinx Wizard

    Xilinx provides a free PCI Express core “EndPoint Block Plus” and free Wizard to Configure it  with their free version of Xilinx-ISE WebPack. So Open Xilinx Core Generator and select End Point Plus Presently core is inactive, we need to  make it active first , On Menu Select File -> New Project to create project and…

  • NTSC Battleship – NTSC generation using VGA DAC

    Here is an interesting project coming out of a Cornell University Engineering class. Two students tackled the challenge of generating color NTSC signals using the DE2 FPGA development board. What’s interesting is they used the 10 bit VGA DAC to generate multiple NTSC signals. They were able to re-purpose the Analog Devices ADV7123 Video DAC…

  • A free version of Microblaze Soft Processor available in Coregen!

    Ever wanted to check out Xilinx’s premier Microblaze Soft Processor but the $500 EDK license was too pricey? Well, Magnus Karlsson pointed out that there is a free lightweight version of Microblaze, called Microblaze MCS, available in ISE’s Coregen wizard. Even better, here is a tutorial showing how to get up and running with it!…

  • Having problems installing Xilinx ISE on Windows 8 64bit? Here is a fix! (Video included)

    Hamster recently tipped us to a working fix for file dialog crashes in Xilinx ISE x64 on Windows 8. This issue has really been a thorn in the side for a lot of users, so it’s great to have this info! Rename libPortability.dll to libPortability.dll.orig, and copy libPortabilityNOSH.dll to libPortability.dll. Do this in: C:\Xilinx\14.5\ISE_DS\ISE\lib\nt64 C:\Xilinx\14.5\ISE_DS\common\lib\nt64…

  • Clever Exploitation Of Vivado HLS To Make A FIR Filter And More

    By way of Colin O’Flynn over at NewAE, we’ve got a wonderful video showing how to basically exploit the Xilinx HLS (High-Level Synthesis) in Vivado to make your own FIR filter in only about 25 minutes! I could attempt to write a synopsis of what is covered in the video, but as they say –…