Gadget Factory

FPGA projects

  • 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…

  • Experimental CPU Project On FPGA

    Victor over at FPGA Related has an inventive new CPU project that he’s been working on and running on an FPGA.  In his article, Victor shares his design, implementation notes, and code for a different kind of CPU – featuring a novel token machine that resolves an 8-bit token to pretty much any address in…

  • Cray-1 Supercomputer Recreated On FPGA

    FPGA Cray 1-A (left) and the original Cray-1 supercomputer (right) Self-described “computational necromancer” Chris Fenton lives up to this description given his penchant for recreating classic computer hardware using FPGAs. With the assistance of the original design documents, reference manuals, and the like Chris recreated the iconic 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer on a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600…

  • Nine Digit Problem Solved In 2.2 ms The FPGA Way

    Here’s the problem: The folks over at Programmable Gatorade wanted to take this classic math problem and put their Altera Cyclone IV FPGA board to use in solving it. The design uses the board’s 50MHz clock and finds the solution in approximately 2.2ms. There are three main components to the design: a module to calculate…

  • NES Game Console Recreated On FPGA

    Today we’ve got a great gamer project to share with you in which a dude recreated the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) on a Digilent Nexus 3 FPGA dev board. The reason?  In his words, I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. Boredom?  That…

  • LCD Hack With Monochrome Hitachi Screen & Papilio

    Gadget Factory forum user Alex received a junked old Hitachi screen from his buddy and decided to see if he could get it up and running. The screen is one of those older monochrome, low-resolution (256 x 128) green LCDs and is missing a controller chip. On the back of the display there are eight…

  • Master’s Projects From Cornell: Gaze Tracking & FPGA Face Tracking

    Happy Friday! We’ve got some fresh Master’s projects from Cornell University’s electronics school to share with you today. We’ll get right into it: This first project is by Master’s students Anil Ram Viswanathan and Zelan Xiao, who have created a head-mounted eyeball gaze tracker, for lack of a better term. The hardware consists of two…

  • 8-Channel Homebrew GPS Receiver On FPGA

    Andrew Holme has created a totally made-from-scratch GPS receiver that can track up to eight satellites, all powered by FPGA. Andrew’s creation has been in the cooker since early 2011, and he has been refining it ever since. Pictured above is the front-end, first mixer and IF amplifier of an experimental GPS receiver. The leftmost…