Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • Hacking the OV7670 camera module (SCCB cheat sheet inside)

    Here is a nice technical write-up of the OV7670 camera module that can be purchased on eBay for under $10. We have a Wing that lets you easily connect this camera to the Papilio. There are also VHDL code examples out there on Hamster’s Wiki page. All we need now is to make a DesignLab…

  • Hamster’s HDMI Input Project

    Take a look at this forum project that Hamster is working on – HDMI input! Watch as he generates video pulls it into a Papilio, then converts it to VGA output. Very cool. 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvHPYmEQb04 I hit a brick wall on this for a couple of days – it locked correctly but no HSYNC or…

  • As Simple as Possible – Embedded.FM Podcast interview about Papilio.

    I was invited to do a podcast interview with the good people over at Embedded.FM, it was fun talking about FPGA’s and the Papilio! Thank you for having me on the show Chris and Elicia! Listen to the full podcast here. Jack Gassett ( @gadgetfactory ) is the creator of the open source FPGA  Papilio…

  • SparkFun Lunch and Learn: FPGAs for Makers, with Steve Grace

    Steve Grace, a Xilinx Engineer, gives a nice presentation at SparkFun on FPGA’s. While this presentation is not geared for beginners it does an amazing job of introducing all of the tools and techniques available with FPGA’s once you get to the intermediate level. Steve also does a very nice job of showing how your…

  • Welcome to the online home of The Zynq Book

    Curious about the Xilinx ZYNQ processor – an FPGA core coupled with two ARM hard processors? Take a look at this free eBook released by Xilinx to learn more! The Zynq Book is the first book about Zynq to be written in the English language. It has been produced by a team of authors from…

  • Flavia: the Free Logic Array

    Check out this amazing project from John Beetem. Make small Digital Logic designs without the heavyweight vendor tools. Flavia tool chain lets you make bit files for the Papilio One 250K with completely FLOSS software! Only CPLD sized designs are possible, but this is a boon for learning Digital Logic on ARM based boards like…

  • Why Oscilloscope Bandwidth Matters

    This is a great article about why Oscilloscope Bandwidth matters. If you are looking to buy a new Oscope soon then give this a read. Thanks Adafruit! The most obvious factor when choosing an oscilliscope is bandwidth. 50MHz is better than 20MHz, and 100MHz is definitely better than 50MHz, etc., but what does that number…

  • A CPLD Video Card With VGA And NTSC

    Here is a project to generate VGA and NTSC from a CPLD. The brains of the outfit is a $5, 100-pin CPLD from Xilinx. Apart from that, the rest of the components are a crystal, PLL, and an almost hilarious number of resistors for the R2R ladder. The one especially unique component is the 25.056815 MHz…