Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • Controlling the output of a Papilio Pro with the wheel of a mouse

    https://youtu.be/N8pwx4Y7E30 There are tons of ways of creating a home-made microcontroller. Today we present a very detailed tutorial on how to achieve this using the rotary encoder from the scroll button of a mouse. This is part 5 of a series. The goal here is to achieve a constant frequency signal at the output of…

  • Up in the air with ArduPilot

    Up in the air with ArduPilot

    The first successful flight of a drone, or unmanned air vehicle (UAV) running on ArduPilot was recently announced. This UAV is powered by a Zynq, a dual-core ARM with an onboard FPGA. This FPGA makes the difference, leaving alone the first flight of a drone using ArduPilot. Using this FPGA allows the controller to handle…

  • MYSTERY FPGA CIRCUIT FEELS THE PRESSURE

    In order to interact with an FPGA board, a user usually presses a button. Is that the only way to interact? Not so sure. A video from Clifford Wolf shows us otherwise. It’s quite intriguing! The Verilog implements a simple ring oscillator (basically an inverter with its output tied to its input). Via Hackaday

  • Interfacing a Chord Keypad to Papilio Duo FPGA Board

    Chorded keyboards are useful tools used to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together. They are a bit like a piano. In the great blog post from Sustburbia, we will see how to efficiently connect one with an FPGA board, especially the Papilio DUO. The keypad is loosely based on the Microwriter – an early UK designed portable…

  • Learning Verilog for FPGAs: Flip Flops

      Creating an adder on Verilog and putting it into an FPGA board can be done in various ways: With or without clocks.  A very detailed and thorough tutorial explains how to use clocked elements to verify whether the adder has ever generated a carry as well as a few counters. Using clocks avoids getting glitches and…

  • Run your ROMs on Papilio Arcade hardware with ROMVault!

    The latest project from GadgetFactory has just been finished and we’re very happy to show you ROMVault! Running old school video games on a Papilio Arcade hardware is a thrilling experience for old time gamers and a good challenge for technology enthusiasts. There is sometimes an issue while running those games: It is not always easy to determine…

  • Open source FPGA toolchain builds CPU

    Ever wondered if you could run a J1a CPU on an FPGA using only open source hardware? This is possible using these three open source tools: an Open Source Forth kernel, SwapForth running on an Open Source CPU, the J1a built using an entirely Open Source FPGA toolchain, IceStorm When you develop software, you need some…

  • Gates to FPGAs: TTL Electrical Properties

    Great reference from Bil Herd about TTL Electrical properties. On the path to exploring complex logic, let’s discuss the electrical properties that digital logic signals are comprised of. While there are many types of digital signals, here we are talking about the more common voltage based single-ended signals and not the dual-conductor based differential signals.…