FPGA
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA . An FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit, generally programmed using a hardware description language. The FPGA contains thousands of logic blocks, that can be connected together to form complex combinatorial logic, and flipflops are used to implement memory and feedback loops.
Ludde's FPGA NES
A friend of mine found a junked Hitachi LCD and gave it to me to see if I could get it going. The LCD is an older type, monochrome low resolution. I couldn't find a datasheet for it or pinouts so I went old school and tracked down datasheets for the chips on board and did some reverse engineering of the schematic using a continuity meter. A very good datasheet resource is the " Hitachi LCD Controller Driver LSI Data Book " which is a compendium of a large number of Hitachi LCD controller chips. According to the datasheet, the large chips on board are six HD61200 column shifters (IC3,4,5 and IC 6,7,8) and two HD61203 row shifters (IC 1,2). The unpopulated footprint is is a little weird with some missing pin traces (the one trace gaps on the short edge of the chip) and one less pin on one side of the chip compared to the other side.
Low res monochrome Hitachi LCD driver - Papilio One - Gadget Factory Forum
This project was made as the final project in a...
This project was made as the final project in a class that I’m attending ( http://www.agstu.se/yh ). The assignement was to make a simple game on a specific hardware that was provided by our teacher. (I made a VHDL game as well, with a custom VGA-component, check http://int80h.se/post/35001027885/fpga-simplistic-arkanoid-the-video-quality-sucks for details).
From Hamsterworks Wiki! After a bit of thinking, this FPGA Project was completed in an hour in November 2012. Here is a simple FM transmitter that is surprisingly good, and very, very simple. The spectral qualities of the RF output will be pretty awful - this is not supposed to be a production design for anything, it is just a hack!
FM SOS - Hamsterworks Wiki!
Build your own FPGA
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under electronics , dfpga , open-7400 The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it. Discrete logic, for anyone who isn't familiar, are any of a number of families of ICs who each perform a single, usually fairly straightforward, function.
「 マンデルブロ集合 をとにかく速く表示したい」との想いから、丸2年の歳月をかけた『Mandelbrot集合描画支援ハードウェア [ Pyxis ] 』が完成したのは、22年前の1988年のことです。 マンデルブロ集合についてはこちら へ Pyxisについてはこちら へ TTL361個を手配線で繋いだそれは、まさしくロジック回路の塊です（右写真）。設計、製作共にとても手間暇のかかるものでしたが、当時はそれしか実現方法がありませんでした。 現在はFPGAという強力な武器があります。これを利用しない手はありません。『同じ作るなら思い切りやってみよう』ということで、大規模なFPGAを使ってどれだけ速くできるのか試してみることにしました。
Mandelbrot集合描画ハードウエア [Pyxis 2010]
From Hamsterworks Wiki! This |FPGA Project was started and finished in October 2012 Note This will not work on all FPGA boards - you have to be able to control all the required signals to the configuration flash. For example, on the Digilent Basys2 the CS line is tied to the "done" signal, so you can't enable the flash chip. Most FPGA boards include a serial Flash chip to hold the configuration bitstream, which the FPGA loads on power up.
Config flash - Hamsterworks Wiki!
We have had a couple of embedded projects for our customers where the requirement were large-screen LVDS displays. By large screen I mean sizes over 7″ and a resolution of 800×480 where the common SSD1963 LCD controller can’t be used as the frame buffer RAM is too small. LVDS Display Controller V1.0 So now we have decided to make our own similar display controller board but for LVDS displays as they are much more inexpensive and common (used in TVs and PCs). As LVDS is a differential signal standard we can’t just connect it directly to an MCU even though it supported the larger display resolutions. So as we already had to use some kind of converter in between we decided to go with an FPGA and embed a complete display controller solution into it.
TKJ Electronics » LVDS Display controller for microprocessors
MbedConsole -- Build Report
Well, I think I should finally document how to actually build the MbedConsole. It's very simple... A full overview schematic(which I think I did a horrible job on) is below: I think this design is simple enough that it doesn't need much further explanation.Lately I've seen lots of homebrew CPUs mentioned in blogs and videos, but not too much about homebrew FPGAs. Did a little digging (mostly on Wikipedia), and was able to breadboard a basic logic cell circuit. Here's how I did it.
FPGA Logic Cells
From Hamsterworks Wiki! This FPGA Project was completed in September 2012. This project lights one segment in each display, and turns all the LEDS on. The board is a TM1638 display board from Deal Extreme ( http://dx.com/p/8x-digital-tube-8x-key-8x-double-color-led-module-81873 ). The only documentation I had available to me was http://code.google.com/p/tm1638-library/ - an Arduino Library in C++.
Dx display - Hamsterworks Wiki!
I'm happy to say I've successfully built a 4-bit version of my ALU. It computes all 18 functions detailed in the truth table from "The Elements of Computing Systems" and outputs them on a 7-segment LED display and 2 single LED's; the number that results from the ALU's computation appears on the 7-segment LED, and the 2 single LED's indicate whether that number is 0 and/or negative. All and all, the ALU was actually less time consuming that I had feared. It still took an annoyingly long time, but I had a bunch of free time the past 2 days and really wanted to get it done.
4-bit ALU - Demonstration, Schematics
1. Introduction LogicPort is a pretty good Logic Analyzer to debug the digital system. The only problem I encountered is that it did not provide the Serial Pattern Trigger feature, thus it is actually hard to deal with the complex SPI, I2C bus. This LA could be used to debug the complex serial bus if it has the serial trigger. As a result, I designed a very simple CPLD board for this Logic Analyzer.