Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • FPGA Nixie Tube Speedometer = Steampunk Goodness

    A Nixie tube speedometer for a vintage pickup truck – seems like the coolest combination ever, right? Check out the video above and you’ll see what I mean. For those who have never heard of a Nixie tube, it’s basically a numeric-display (there are also character-display variants) vacuum tube that works very similarly to a…

  • Motion-Tracking Project Lets You Be A Robot Puppeteer

    Embedded Systems Design student Annie Dai recently finished up her final project for the Spring 2013 semester at Cornell University. Based on an Altera DE-2 FPGA board, her project was designed to track realtime movement in a subject’s upper body (head, torso, right & left arms) using the DE-2, a VGA monitor, and a video…

  • Controlling An LCD Module With Your FPGA

    By way of FPGA 4 Fun, we have a great and easy project on driving a one line/ 16- character (HD44780 chip-based) LCD display using your FPGA. This project works with HD44780-compatible modules also. The project page covers controlling the LCD module by utilizing a 7-bit design, an 8-bit design, as well as some code…

  • Chess-Playing FPGAs @ Design West 2014

    Warren Miller of All Programmable Planet has a plan to turn his research and writings about teaching an FPGA to play chess into a real thing – at next year’s Design West event. His plan is to have “an extravaganza at Design West 2014 in which electronic “Robot” chess players can compete on the big…

  • Hand-Detecting ‘Anti-Tetris’ Game Project

    Ahh, springtime. The sun is out, there’s a fresh breeze blowing, the scent of blooming flowers is in the air, birds are chirping, etc. etc. And the final FPGA projects from the spring 2013 semester keep coming in! Today we’ve got a great one from Cornell University student Tian Gao, built using an Altera DE2…

  • How To: Use Your FPGA For Precision DC Motor Control

    Here is a simple little project that you can use to control a DC motor with some pretty tight precision from your FPGA board. This could be useful for some of your projects! Chris over at Pyroelectro has all the tutorial goodness you’ll need to get one of these up and running. He gives a…

  • FPGA Plays Super Mario Bros Just Like A Real Human Does

    It’s no secret that we love FPGAs and we love games. When we see a cool project that combines both of these, it’s kinda hard NOT to post it here on the blog. Advanced Microcontroller Design students Jeremy Blum, Sima Mitra, and Jason Wright have been hard at work on their open source, FPGA-based, Super…

  • FPGA Piano Hero Game Uses Camera Touchscreen

    More Cornell University student FPGA projects coming your way! These guys come up with some great implementations of FPGA technology. This time around we have Embedded Systems Design students Chonggang Li and Ran Hu who built a video-camera based touchscreen system using an Altera DE2 FPGA and a Piano Hero game to interact with. In…