Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • Introduction To Crystals And Oscillators

    At the heart of any FPGA you will have an oscillator that creates a stable clock signal. This signal is generated from a physical crystal (quartz) which once run through with electricity, will oscillate at its resonant frequency.  Oscillators contain both the resonator (crystal) and the electronic component (the amplifier) which are both required to maintain the oscillations. In reference to the…

  • Hand-Tracking Pong Game On FPGA

    Cornell University students Hanting Lu and Kedari Elety have made an FPGA-based, hand-tracking Pong game for their final class project this year. They’ve got an HTC 231x CCD camera feeding video data to their Altera DE-2 FPGA, which is processing the hand motion data and using it to control a game of Pong. You can…

  • Bitcoin Mining On A Repurposed FPGA

    Here’s a cool hack. Taylor Killian was on Reddit one day and came across a post that gave him an idea. Long story short, he found an HDMI color processing board (make/model: eeColor Color3) on Newegg for *free* after rebate. This device just happens to contain an FPGA – an Altera Cyclone 4, 30K logic element…

  • FPGA Audio Visualizer Project

    Embedded Systems Design student Zhemao and his class group have been working on an FPGA FFT audio visualizer for their final project. Their design was implemented entirely in VHDL on an Altera DE2 board, the results of which are all bouncy and blue in the above vid. Basically, it’s a hardware audio player that reads…

  • Hardware And The Bitcoin Goldrush

    Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency, best described as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin is known for its volatility – values of the currency can fluctuate wildly in a relatively short period of time. But there’s a virtual goldrush going on these days for the stuff, and the tools used to get at the…

  • Turbografx-16 Game Console Recreated On FPGA

    Remember the Turbografx-16 (PC Engine in Japan) video game console from the early 1990s?  I used to love playing Bonk’s Adventure on that thing.  FPGA hacker and nostalgic gamer Gregory decided to recreate the Turbografx-16 hardware within an FPGA and it seems to be working pretty well!  Aah, brings me back. For this project, it looks…

  • The Basics You’ll Need To Start Hacking With FPGAs

    It’s well known that FPGAs can be difficult to get started with, to the point of being downright intimidating.  We’re always on the lookout for information that can help make the learning curve a little less… curvy.   Today we’ve got an easy-to-follow information compilation for understanding FPGAs and how they work, courtesy of FPGAhacker.  Let’s just call it some…

  • FPGA-Powered Visual MIDI Music Composition Tool

    Here’s a great FPGA final project from Cornell University student Joao Diogo Faloao. It is a visual MIDI-based musical composition tool running on an Altera DE-2 FPGA board. This one’s going to appeal to a very small subset of people – those trained to read and write musical notation, and who also have a pretty…