Gadget Factory

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  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Wire Wrap 101

    Wire wrapping is an incredible prototyping method that produces very secure and clean circuits on perf boards. When you are ready to move beyond the breadboard but not ready to design a pcb then wire wrapping is the perfect solution. But, if you are like me you always heard of wire wrapping but never saw…

  • 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…

  • Stepper

    Hamster puts together a nice tutorial with code about driving a stepper motor with an FPGA.               Driving a stepper motor using an external driver board is a bit tricky when using a microcontroller. With an FPGA it is a piece of cake! via hamsterworks.co.nz

  • An SDK for the ESP8266 WiFi Chip

    The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio, TCP/IP stack, and all the required bits to get a microcontroller on the Internet into a tiny, $5 module. It’s an interesting chip, not only because it’s a UART to WiFi module, allowing nearly anything to get on the…

  • Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) Explained by [Bil Herd]

    Bil Herd, the designer of the Commodore 128, talks about DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis) on a CPLD. There is some excellent information here that is very applicable to the Papilio FPGA. Maybe we can even adopt this project to DesignLab. “One of the acronyms you may hear thrown around is DDS which stands for Direct…