Gadget Factory

VHDL

  • How To Control What You See On A Screen in Two Hours and For Less Than $25!

    Imagine how cool it would be to control what appears on your screen and at a bargain price, just using your FPGA (yes! Your Papilio!) and some other easy-to-get components. All you need is read today´s article (and buy the tiny things of course). This how-to post is one of those which are written thinking…

  • Here is How The Dark Side Got Started With Their Robot Army!

    Nowadays, you may be fed up of Star Wars jokes, baits and so on. I am sorry, I could not resist the temptation. Anyway, this time, at least, was not a joke nor a lie. Today´s article brings the real truth to you. If you want to build your own robot, as simple as you…

  • The Oldland CPU 32-bit FPGA Core

    Here is a promising looking Soft Processor core available on OpenCores.com. It looks like it has some nice simulation and debugging tools built in – as well as a C toolchain. Included with the package is oldland-rtlsim, which lets you simulate the processor on a PC. The oldland-debug tool lets you connect to the processor for…

  • 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…

  • Stepper

    Hamster puts together a nice tutorial with code about driving a stepper motor with an FPGA.               Driving a stepper motor using an external driver board is a bit tricky when using a microcontroller. With an FPGA it is a piece of cake! via hamsterworks.co.nz

  • Intelligent LEDs – Using WS2812B LEDs with the Papilio.

      Hamster shows us how to use the latest and greatest WS2812B LEDs! The interface is pretty simple – the state of the bus has to be reset by holding the data signal low for 50us, followed with sending out 24 bits for each LED that is connected in the string. The ‘1’ bits are sent…

  • SD card testing

    Check it out as Hamster plays around with SD cards. So far he has it initializing the card using VHDL! Here is the test setup – a Papilio FPGA board from http://www.gadgetfactory.net/, and a SD adapter from http://www.futurlec.com/: via hamsterworks.co.nz