Gadget Factory

pi

  • EEVblog #754 – Altium Circuit Maker First Impressions

    Altium’s free version of their PCB software called Circuit Maker is open to the public now. We gave it a spin and liked it, here is a video showing some more details. Dave gives his first impression of Altium’s new FREE PCB design tool for the maker community, Circuit Maker. via www.eevblog.com

  • 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…

  • Hacking the OV7670 camera module (SCCB cheat sheet inside)

    Here at Gadget Factory we’ve been thinking about the best way to provide support for the OV7670 Camera Wing that we have. This page we came across provides a treasure trove of information about how the OV7670 camera works.       The OV7670 is a low cost image sensor + DSP that can operate…

  • Simple Infrared PWM on Arduino

    Nice code walk through of how to generate a PWM in C code. This is a 3 part series showing how to generate IR commands in software. We are often asked on discussion boards, about conflicts between IRremote or IRLib and other Arduino Libraries. In this post, we present a sketch for ‘Simple Infrared PWM…

  • Atari devs dissect Yars’ Revenge, Adventure, Atari’s woes

    Here is a very interesting article about the development of some of the early Atari 2600 games. It’s fun that we can recreate these classic games on an FPGA! “I’m going to tell you about the design of Adventure for the 2600, a game I designed in 1979,” Warren Robinett said simply and plainly to…

  • HDMI Splitter is also a Decrypter

    Esar’s Ambilight clone that runs on the Papilio Pro is an awesome project, I still have one on my desk waiting to be tested.  One of the challenges is HDCP protected content – but with this awesome hack it is no longer an issue! His amazing custom Ambilight clone got profiled here, and someone asked…

  • 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…

  • Spin Brushless DC Motors Slowly

    Here is some good reference material on spinning Brushless DC motors that should be applicable to the Papilio. We would just need to add some sensors to spin the motors faster…   I used specialized triple half bridge IC L6234 (~ 8$). You can make the same spending less money (but more time) with MOSFET…