Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • Robotic Arm Controlled In Realtime Using FPGA

    FPGA and robotics enthusiast ZaIoNeL has created a grasping, clamping robotic arm that has six degrees of freedom alongside a spherical wrist for maximum dexterity. On the hardware front, he’s using a keyboard, two Altera FPGAs, two Xbee modules, power supply, and of course the robotic arm. The robo-arm project uses a couple of Altera FPGA boards…

  • RF-Controlled FPGA ‘Land Rover’ Project

    University student Naresh Singh Dobal created an FPGA-based, RF-controllable rover vehicle for his Digital Systems Design class, as his final project last year.  Naresh is using a Xilinx Spartan 3AN FPGA dev board for the brains of the system, and has done all the coding in VHDL.  The whole project was made and programmed pretty…

  • Rock Out With This FPGA MIDI Drumkit Project

    LUMS SSE Electrical Engineering undergrads Haris Usmani and Bilal Mahmood have created a fully functional, low-latency MIDI drumkit project using an FPGA board for their Digital Systems Design class.  The kit is comprised of four piezo sensors with ADCs, one Digilent Nexys-2 Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA, Serial to MIDI software and a laptop with the EZDrummer…

  • FPGA Light Timers Help Keep The Homestead Safe

    When embedded systems designer Robin Findley was living in the ‘hood, he knew he would have to be a step ahead of the bad guys when he took his family on vacation. When you live in a neighborhood where a SWAT team raid two doors down is not unheard of, you’ve gotta take some precautions.…

  • Indie Game ‘Meat Boy’ Cloned For Play On An FPGA

    By way of Reddit, here is one college student’s project in which he recreates the awesome indie Flash game Meat Boy on an FPGA. The FPGA Meat Boy creator, known only as “skipToThe3nd” used an Altera DE2 for the project.  Here is an excerpt from his Reddit thread (when skipToThe3nd was asked about his display…

  • VHDL 101: Beginner’s Guide To VHDL

    Paul Clark from Design Spark has a great wiki on VHDL 101 – Combinational Logic that we thought we’d repost here to give those of you that are new to VHDL kind of a kick start.  This one is actually the follow-up to his first article titled What Is VHDL that has some great explanations of…

  • Your FPGA Is Better Than You Are At Chess

    Yes, your FPGA board can beat you at chess.  At least, that’s the objective of Warren Miller over at All Programmable Planet in his series titled A Chess-Playing FPGA. Warren has been thinking about “developing a different way of thinking about solving complex problems using FPGAs, as opposed to the traditional sequential approach we are…

  • DIY Screen-Printed PCB Manufacturing Is Slightly Crazy

    If MacGyver were to manufacture his own PCBs, this is definitely how he would do it.  We’re talking hairdryers, ovens, a garden hose, a pile of bricks, a couple of UV bulbs, a piece of glass, a makeshift hazmat suit and some chemicals.  The DIY spirit is alive and well in this vid! The printed circuit boards made…