Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • 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

  • Open Source Hardware Advances Science,Technology

            Papilio One spotted in article about Open Source Hardware! Developments in open source are not just exciting as viable and marketable options, but as a real boon for innovation. Growing interest along with shared goals to create and better developments in science and technology inspired a team at CERN to create…

  • 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…

  • HDMI Light V2

    I was browsing HackADay when I came across an article called, “FPGA Ambilight Clone Packs a Ton of Features“. I immediately got excited and thought, “I hope we can port this to the Papilio.” When I opened the article I saw to my great delight that the project WAS done on the Papilio! Even better…

  • Robot Vision: Detecting Obstacles with FPGAs and line lasers

    Check out this FPGA project that uses a camera module and laser to do obstacle and cliff detection. It’s Wishbone compatible so we should be easily able to import this project into DesignLab.   Somewhere down the road, you’ll find that your almighty autonomous robot chassis is going to need some sensor feedback. Otherwise, that next…

  • 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

  • Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) Explained by [Bil Herd]

    Bil Herd, the designer of the Commodore 128, talks about DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis) on a CPLD. There is some excellent information here that is very applicable to the Papilio FPGA. Maybe we can even adopt this project to DesignLab. “One of the acronyms you may hear thrown around is DDS which stands for Direct…