Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • An Open Source Toolchain For iCE40 FPGAs

    This is a positive first step towards an open source toolchain for FPGA’s. Hopefully we will see something for Xilinx FPGA’s as well. We can always dream that Xilinx will open the format! After months of work, and based on the previous work of [Clifford Wolf] and [Mathias Lasser], [Cotton Seed] has released a fully…

  • The Oldland CPU 32-bit FPGA Core

    Here is a promising looking Soft Processor core available on OpenCores.com. It looks like it has some nice simulation and debugging tools built in – as well as a C toolchain. Included with the package is oldland-rtlsim, which lets you simulate the processor on a PC. The oldland-debug tool lets you connect to the processor for…

  • Simple Tools for Low Level ZPUino Hacking

      Monsonite is working on a visual debugger for the ZPUino that utilizes the new VGA peripheral that Alvie recently released. Monsonite’s debugger shows the disassembled machine language and memory regions to help you debug your ZPUino code. He’s put one weekend of work into this so far and plans to keep going with more…

  • CastAR Teardown

      If you are like us you have been following Jerri Ellsworth’s castAR project with a sense of awe and anticipation. It’s an amazing project made with an FPGA and we can’t wait to see one of these things in person. Until that happens we found a great teardown video that shows all the pretty insides…

  • Using a FPGA as a CAD engine

    Papilio DUO user Monsonite just posted about a cool project he is making with the ZPUino and the new VGA adapter. It’s a self contained CAD engine and he already has a LQFP-64 footprint rendering on the screen. Stop by the forum and check it out! Hi Jack and Forum, I have been experimenting with…

  • ChipWhisperer-Lite: A New Era of Hardware Security Research

    Our favorite FPGA security hacker, Colin O’Flynn, has a new Kickstarter project that just went online. It’s the ChipWhisperer-Lite which packs a serious punch with a Spartan 6 FPGA, 10-bit ADC, and an XMega Micro. Included with the board is software and tutorials to get you up to speed with embedded hardware security research projects…

  • The Papilio DUO and the new shields are finally here!

    Here at Gadget Factory we are happy to announce that our next generation of products are now available at our online store. The long awaited Papilio DUO along with the new Papilio Shields are finally here after a successful Kickstarter campaign that helped us raise more than $62.000 in funds to make this dream come…

  • HDMI Audio and Video for Neo Geo MVS

    Here is a cool project that adds HDMI output to a Neo Geo arcade board using an FPGA. When he tested the HDMI with his monitor, it was out of spec but still worked. His TV, on the other hand, refused to play it at all. This was due to the Neo Geo outputting 59.1…