Gadget Factory

user submissions

  • MatthewH puts together a simple SDRAM controller for use with the Papilio Pro.

    Papilio user Matthew Hagerty put together a very nice implementation of a simple SDRAM controller for the Papilio Pro FPGA. Written in VHDL, it sacrifices some speed for ease of use and simplicity. After all, not every project needs to use the full capacity of the SDRAM chip. You can read about his epic adventure…

  • “Really Dumb” MIDI Monitor For RetroCade

    Forum member Offroad recently hit us up with an example project, which is  based on the Papilio Pro and the RetroCade Synth. He’s calling it the Really Dumb MIDI Monitor.  This deserves a bit of explanation: For starters, Offroad explains what he means by the term, “really dumb meaning: All the fun stuff like printf(“%02c”, byte) happens in…

  • Papilio Pro Breathes New Life Into Old Laptop Display

    Papilio Pro user James Glanville recently posted a great project that he’s been working on, over at the Gadget Factory forums. He was nice enough to share his code and some photos for the project, in which he has got his Papilio Pro hooked up to an old laptop LCD display that he had sitting around the workshop.…

  • Screen Recycling: Papilio Driving A Junker LCD Screen

    Papilio user James wrote in on the the forums about his LCD display project that he has been working on.  James is using his Papilio, a junked old Epson EG2401 monochrome LCD display, and a buffer board that he built from scratch.  It’s similar to another junked display project that we posted a while ago, yet…

  • VHDL SD Card Writer v1.0 For Papilio

    Forum user Matt Ownby has put together some code to be able to write data at full speed (50 MHz) to an SD card, and was kind enough to share it with us!  This is VHDL code for the Papillio One FPGA board that shows how to write to an SD card in a high-speed mode. Here’s the…

  • Arcade Game Trifecta On Papilio Pro, Arcade MegaWing

    Forum user and regular contributor Alex recently dropped us a line on the forums.  He was saying something about getting new arcade games running on the Papilio Pro with the Arcade MegaWing.  Turns out he’s got three arcade games going (Ladybug, Dorodon, and Cosmic Avenger) and is using a PS/2 keyboard for controls. Alex says, [The games]…

  • Game On: PacManicMinerMan Released

    Forum user Jim, AKA “Baggers” wrote in on the Gadget Factory forums to let us know that he’s finished with his rewrite of Manic Miner for the Pac-Man hardware. We will be working the game into the Arcade Blaster app shortly! Hi All, If you remember, a while back I was working on making a…

  • User Project: FM Radio Transmitter Built on Papilio

    We found an exciting and simple project yesterday on our forums that describes how to  turn your Papilio into an FM radio transmitter using nothing more than 60 lines of VHDL code and a piece of wire. The end result is an FPGA-based transmitter bleeping out “SOS” in Morse Code over FM radio. Longtime Gadget Factory…