Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • Using A Raspberry Pi As A Commodore 64 Disk Drive

    The Commodore 64’s influence continues to echo. There’s a great throwback project going on over at Insentricity involving an R-Pi being used as a disk drive for the Commodore 64. Check out the vid for a nice look at the project! I’ve made some more progress on my software that allows the Raspberry Pi to…

  • Vector Graphics Arcade Games On An FPGA

    This is a pretty cool reincarnation of the old-school vector graphics arcade games – now reborn on FPGA. You just might recognize vector graphics from such classic arcade games as Asteroids, Gravitar, and Tempest. Vector was an interesting display technology at the time, differentiating itself from pixel-based video game graphics by using a method of…

  • Augmented Reality Edge-Detection Game On DE-2 FPGA

    The cool FPGA projects just won’t let up over at Cornell University. In this one, we’ve got students Chris Fairfax, Matheus Ogleari, and Aadeetya Shreedha with their realtime edge-detection physics-based ball game implimented on an Altera DE-2 dev board. This is some seriously cool design. The project uses the Sobel operator to detect the edges…

  • RFID Adapter Cape Project: 2013 TI Design Challenge

    Here’s another innovative project from the 2013 Texas Instruments Intern Design Challenge, courtesy of Sheng Zhao, Amulya Kattimani, and Edwin Flores. Their project is called the BeagleBone Black RFID Adapter Cape. I posted a video of what the team is envisioning for their project above, and on their project page there are a couple more…

  • Accelerometer Tilt Sensing On Altera DE0 Nano FPGA

    We found a great tutorial for using an accelerometer’s tilt data on an FPGA over at Pyro Electro. In this particular project, they’re using an Altera DE0-Nano board (and using the built-in accelerometer), a breadboard, the DE0-Nano Development Suite software, (32x) 100 mega resistors, (32x) green LEDs, and jumper wires. Check out the video above,…

  • One Guy’s Endeavor Into Grading Microamps & Milliamps At A 3 MHz Bandwidth

    Recently I needed to actually “see” a current waveform in the 100 uA to 5 mA range with at least a couple MHz bandwidth. This extremely expensive probe would have been perfect, but instead I built something similar for about $30 using the amazing Analog Devices AD8428 amplifier. Rather than buying an extremely costly o-scope…

  • DIY IR Object-Detection Module On The Cheap

    If you’ve ever needed some kind of infrared (IR) object detection sensor for one of your projects, here’s a simple and cheap way to make one. These IR sensor modules can be useful for small DIY robotics projects, or really whatever you can dream up! The main concept is simple , the IR LED keeps…

  • Bitcoin Mining Rig With R-Pi & DE0-Nano FPGA

    Here’s an interesting Bitcoin mining rig consisting of both a Raspberry Pi and an Altera DE0-Nano FPGA board. The guys over at Design Spark decided to give this Bitcoin mining thing a try, and their project page details their efforts. You’ll find the links below for those who would be interested to give it a…