Gadget Factory

FPGA

  • Please electronic hobbyists… start using FPGA’s!

    We were just emailed about this cool FPGA/Papilio video so we thought we should share it on the blog. Check it out! This video will explain why FPGA’s are great to build your projects on! via www.youtube.com

  • Putting laptop LCDs to use with an FPGA

    And here is another HackaDay post about driving an LCD with an FPGA! LCD panels don’t use a simple protocol like VGA for turning pixels on and off. Instead, the very high-speed LVDS is used. LVDS is beyond the capabilities of simple microprocessors, so [EiNSTeiN_] built himself a clone of an XuLA FPGA prototyping board…

  • Reverse Engineer then Drive LCD with FPGA

    Nice! A Ben Heck episode where he drives a LCD with an FPGA! This project is a soup to nuts demonstration of replacing electronics drivers; the skill is certainly not limited to LCD modules. He starts by disassembling the hardware to find what look like differential signaling lines. With that in mind he hit the Internet…

  • Open Source Hardware Advances Science,Technology

            Papilio One spotted in article about Open Source Hardware! Developments in open source are not just exciting as viable and marketable options, but as a real boon for innovation. Growing interest along with shared goals to create and better developments in science and technology inspired a team at CERN to create…

  • DesignLab 0.2.0 Released for Windows and Linux.

    Hello everyone, Exciting news! We just hit a major milestone with a DesignLab 0.2.0 release for both Windows and Linux that can be downloaded here. This is the first release that has all of the core functionality envisioned for DesignLab in place: -Every sketch has an FPGA circuit associated with it and there is smooth…

  • Inferring true dual-port, dual-clock RAMs in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs

    Excellent method to infer a Block RAM memory block of any size in simple code that works for Xilinx and Altera devices. I needed to generate some BRAM for a DesignLab module I was putting together and I remembered I had seen this somewhere but couldn’t remember where… Some digging in google brought this back…

  • HDMI Light V2

    I was browsing HackADay when I came across an article called, “FPGA Ambilight Clone Packs a Ton of Features“. I immediately got excited and thought, “I hope we can port this to the Papilio.” When I opened the article I saw to my great delight that the project WAS done on the Papilio! Even better…

  • Robot Vision: Detecting Obstacles with FPGAs and line lasers

    Check out this FPGA project that uses a camera module and laser to do obstacle and cliff detection. It’s Wishbone compatible so we should be easily able to import this project into DesignLab.   Somewhere down the road, you’ll find that your almighty autonomous robot chassis is going to need some sensor feedback. Otherwise, that next…