Gadget Factory

  • 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…

    Jack Gassett

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  • 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…

    Jack Gassett

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  • 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

    Jack Gassett

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  • BitCoin Miner Library for DesignLab

    A new BitCoin library has been released for DesignLab over at the DesignLab library directory. Keep watching the directory for new libraries.               Mine BitCoin’s with your Papilio! It’s not terribly fast, but it’s still fun to mine your own bitcoins. via forum.gadgetfactory.net

    Jack Gassett

  • Gameduino Library Released for DesignLab

    The Gameduino Library is now available for DesignLab! Check out the new library at the new DesignLab library directory. New libraries will be added every week!                 Gameduino is a really great Open Source FPGA project put together by James Bowman. It allows you to add graphics and…

    Jack Gassett

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  • An SDK for the ESP8266 WiFi Chip

    The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio, TCP/IP stack, and all the required bits to get a microcontroller on the Internet into a tiny, $5 module. It’s an interesting chip, not only because it’s a UART to WiFi module, allowing nearly anything to get on the…

    Jack Gassett

  • 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…

    Jack Gassett

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  • 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…

    Jack Gassett

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