Gadget Factory

FPGA projects

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Implementing SPI & I2C Interfaces On Papilio One

    Papilio user and tech blogger Duane Benson from All Programmable Planet has a new article on his ongoing quest to create his own robotic tele-presence avatar. This one is about implementing SPI and I2C interfaces on his Papilio One for the project. Duane’s avatar will need a series of motors and sensor controls for various…

  • 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.…