Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Spin Brushless DC Motors Slowly

    Here is some good reference material on spinning Brushless DC motors that should be applicable to the Papilio. We would just need to add some sensors to spin the motors faster…   I used specialized triple half bridge IC L6234 (~ 8$). You can make the same spending less money (but more time) with MOSFET…

  • 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…

  • Universal Active Filters: Part 2

    Here is another great Bil Herd article about Active Filters. Thank you HackaDay! In this installment I’ll test the theory that filtering out the harmonics which make up a square wave results in a predictable degradation of the waveform until at last it is a sine wave. This sine wave occurs at the fundamental frequency of the…

  • 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…