Breadboard friendly FPGAs

mercury_angle

Regular Hackaday readers will be familiar with all the cool things you can do with FPGAs; emulating old video game consoles, cracking encryption protocols, and DIY logic analyzers become relatively simple projects with even a modest FPGA dev board on your workbench. Many FPGA boards aren't geared towards prototyping, though, and breadboard friendly devices are hard to come by. Here's a pair of … [Read more...]

Abstracting transistors into high-level design

gates

Although it's not the best way of understanding computers, most people tend to imagine electronic devices as black boxes filled with magic and blue smoke. Even microcontrollers, the most fundamental means of computation, are treated like little black plastic centipedes with metal legs. In a series of blog posts, [Andrew Gibiansky] is tearing down the walls of obfuscation and illuminating the … [Read more...]

On not designing circuits with evolutionary algorithms

animation

[Henrik] has been working on a program to design electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It's still very much a work in progress, but he's gotten to the point of generating a decent BJT inverter after 78 generations (9 minutes of compute time), as shown in the .gif above. To evolve these circuits, [Henrik] told a SPICE simulation to generate an inverter with a 5V power … [Read more...]

Two interesting boards coming down the pipe

boards

Hey, it's a hardware twofer! Here's two platforms coming down the pipe: First up is the Mimo Dreamplug, the latest in a continued expansion of choices for very tiny, single-board Linux computers. The Dreamplug should be extremely capable of just about any task you can throw at it. With a 1.2GHz Marvell Sheeva CPU, eSATA, fiber optic/TOSLINK, WiFi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, … [Read more...]

Hardware-based security keypad keeps it simple

hardware_keypad_lock

Instructables user [trumpkin] recently built an all-hardware based keypad lock for a contest he was entering, and we thought it was pretty neat. The lock uses mostly NAND gates and 555 timers to get the job done, which makes it a nice alternative to similar software-based projects we have seen in the past. The lock has 6 keys on the keypad, which is connected to the main logic board. The … [Read more...]

Hardware hack 3D, software still needed

If you're on the fence about 3D TV and related technologies [Anton B.] might be able to help you decide. No, he's not going to shove pamphlets in your face and explain why its the wave of the future. Rather, by showing the hack-ability (its a word) of 3D shutter glasses. A simple bridge of wire across specific contacts can 'trick' the glasses into only displaying only the left or right … [Read more...]

Core3Duino (April fools?!) and xDuino

Don't bring a PIC to an Arduino fight.

It's inevitable. You knew it, we knew it, and while this is being posted on April 1st; its no joke. [johndavid400's] Core3Duino. As we mentioned before, with the additional Arduinos you have now 3 separate processors, allowing 24digital IO, 18 PWM, 18 analog inputs, and more. Now to keep flamers at bay (calm down), we've combined this post with the introduction of xDuino. Yet another attempt at … [Read more...]