SEGA Genesis Cloned With An FPGA

[Greg] managed to clone a SEGA Genesis using a field programmable gate array. He used a Terasic/Altera DE1 board, which will set you back about $160, during development. The onboard push buttons are currently used as the controller with VGA for the display. Who knows, maybe there’s enough programming space left to drive a PSP screen and turn this into a handheld?

You can see some gameplay footage after the break. If SEGA was never your thing don’t forget that there is an NES FPGA hack out there too.

Continue reading “SEGA Genesis Cloned With An FPGA”

Neon Binary Clock

[Josiah] said ‘no’ to LEDs and instead used blue-phosphor neon lamps to build this binary clock. The ATmega328 inside uses three 8-bit shift registers to control the display. Each lamp needs a high-voltage NPN transistor in order to switch on the 150V necessary for proper illumination. A simple circuit was used to pull a 60 Hz clock signal out of the incoming 16VAC power. Unfortunately it was a bit too simple and didn’t provide a clean signal. [Josiah’s] workaround is something of a debounce subroutine in the firmware to prevent multiple interrupts on the falling edge.

The last project we saw from [Josiah] was the Coachella Lamp. That was a show piece of antiquated technology and this is another show piece with a minimalistic style. We also liked seeing the protoboard work on the inside. That’s a pretty jam-packed circuit board and keeping everything in the right place while you build up each trace with blobs of solder is no small feat.

Decapping Integrated Circuits With Sap

[James] is interested in reverse engineering some integrated circuits. One of the biggest hurdles in this process has always been just getting to the guts of the chip. He used acetone to dissolve the plastic case but had trouble getting through the epoxy blob. Commonly, the epoxy is soaked in nitric acid for a few minutes but [James] didn’t have access to that chemical. Instead he popped into the local music store and picked up some rosin (used to make violin bows sticky enough to grab the strings of the instrument). After boiling down the rock-hard rosin and the chip for 20 minutes, he got a clean and relatively undamaged semiconductor that he can easily peer into.

CNC Build Ditches Rods For Hardboard

This is a redesigned x-axis for [Peter Jansen’s] selective laser sintering rig. We looked in on his SLS project last month and since then he’s been refining the design. The new component uses a rack and pinion system, relying on some Kapton tape to reduce friction for a nice smooth slide. One stepper motor powers the laser-cut gear box with four gears interfacing the sled to the frame for stable and accurate motion. Now he’s just got to work out the math/physics that go into finding the optimal gear ratios as this prototype is just a rough guess. If you’ve got the skills to work it out please lend [Peter] a hand as we’re quite excited with where this is going.

General Purpose Robot Remote

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwb3fn51r4]

[theGrue] has posted his Robot remote control project for us to gawk at. This box o’ buttons is a parallax propeller brain with some Xbee units for communication. Though it was designed to work with TOBI, his tool carrying robot, he made it so that he could control a multitude of robots with it by flipping some switches on the front of the remote.

[via Hacked Gadgets]