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Papilio One User Hack
Here at Gadget Factory, we not only make hackable hardware, we encourage the hacking of hardware – especially if it’s one of our boards! Papilio user Atomsoft describes his project to upgrade his Papilio One 250 board to a 500E chip. It’s a cool and easy project, and Atomsoft’s end result gives him a whole bunch of new…
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Virtual 7-Segment Display Generator for the Papilio Arcade
Here’s some more user-contributed code from reader Alex, this time on making a virtual 7-segment display on the Papilio Arcade in VHDL. The 7-segment display is outputted to VGA, and can be used to superimpose alphanumeric characters on top of any video already coming out on VGA. The position, size, and color of the…
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Translating Verilog to VHDL for Galaxian
A little while back, we received some user contributed code from reader and Papilio user Alex, for converting Verilog code to VHDL. The article illustrates the conversion for the game Galaxian. If you’re learning VHDL, or are interested in Verilog to VHDL conversion, Alex’s article lays it out nicely for you with examples from Katsumi Degawa’s Galaxian FPGA project. With…
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VHDL Communication With A PS/ 2 Keyboard
Thanks to reader Hamster, who submitted this peachy Wiki page! Hamster has written some VHDL code for communicating with a PS/ 2 keyboard that can be found on the wiki! Useful stuff: “It has lots of features: It does full start bit, stopbit and parity check … deglitches the signals, by requiring a state change of longer than…
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How To: Designing An FPGA Based Graphics Controller For HD
By way of EE Times, here’s a lengthy, if not highly informative nitty-gritty on designing an HD FPGA graphics controller. “Using faster memories and embedded hardware blocks let us to design more complex and more powerful designs – designs which just a year or so ago would have been hard to implement without using…
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News: EagleUp For Viewing Hardware Designs In Google SketchUp
[screencast url=”http://www.screencast.com/t/uwejMD0WoJ6″ width=”600″ height=”300″] Here’s an interesting article we found on Hackaday about a software solution called EagleUp, which can open your PCB designs in SketchUp and will give you a 3-d rendering of your hardware. “This is a wonderful way to make sure that your enclosure designs are going to work without needing to wait for…
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Papilio Bit File Loader GUI Now Available!
We are proud to announce that we have just released a GUI bit file loader for the Papilio! We already have a command line tool and a dialog based menu interface for loading bit files to the Papilio but the Papilio Loader GUI 2.0 beta is the first full GUI. (Stay tuned, Linux and Mac versions coming soon.)…
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Jeri Ellsworth recreates an audio codec chip using the Papilio.
Jeri Ellsworth picked up a new pinball machine that sounded horrible due to an obsolete chip that was blown, but for her that was no problem. It just gave her the opportunity to reverse engineer the faulty HC55564 audio compression chip and recreate it using an FPGA. The best part is that she used the…