DisplayPort With An FPGA

September 23, 2015 by 32 Comments

One of the challenges with display technology is the huge increase in bandwidth that has occurred since LCD panels took over from Cathode Ray Tubes. Low end laptops have a million pixels, UHD (“4K”) displays
have 8 million and the latest Full Ultra HD (“8k”) displays have over 33 million pixels. Updating all those pixels takes a lot of bandwidth – to update a 4k display at 60 Hz refresh rates takes close to a gigabyte per second. 8 billion bits – that is a lot of bits! That’s why VGA ports and even DVI ports are starting to vanish in favor of standards like HDMI and DisplayPort.

The current release of HDMI is 2.0, and is tightly licensed with NDAs and licensing fees. VESA, who created the DisplayPort standard, states the standard is royalty-free to implement, but since January 2010, all new DisplayPort related standards issued by VESA are no longer available to non-members.

So after receiving a new Digilent Nexys Video FPGA development board, Hackaday regular [Hamster] purchased a UHD monitor, scoured the internet for an old DisplayPort 1.1 standard, and started hacking.

A couple of months and 10,000 lines of VHDL code later what may be the first working Open Source DisplayPort
implementation is available. The design includes a 16-bit scrambler, an 8b/10b encoder, and multichannel support.

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Learn Flip Flops With Simulation

September 23, 2015 by 19 Comments

Digital design with combinatorial gates like AND, OR, and NOT gates is relatively straightforward. In particular, when you use these gates to form combinatorial logic, the outputs only depend on the inputs. The previous state of the outputs isn’t important in combinatorial logic. While this is simple, it also prevents you from building things like state machines, counters, and even CPUs.

Circuits that use their own outputs as inputs are known as sequential circuits. It is true that at the fundamental level, sequential circuits use conventional logic gates. However, you usually won’t deal with them as gates, but will deal with abstractions like latches, flip flops, and even higher level constructs. Learning about these higher level constructs will allow you to make more advanced digital designs that are robust. In fact, if you are using an FPGA, building blocks like flip flops are essential since a large portion of the chip will be made up of some kind of flip flop.

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Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Zürich On Thursday

September 23, 2015 by 2 Comments

Join us for a Meetup Thursday the 24th of September in Zürich, Switzerland. We’re co-hosting a meetup with FabLab Zürich and we are excited to see you!

Doors open at 18:00 on Thursday, 24 September. We’ll have some food and drink, project show and tell, and time to hang out and get to know each other. This is a free event but please RSVP to let us know you’re coming.

Bring the project you are working on to show off, everyone loves to see projects regardless of what stage they’re in. Many times, showing your project and talking about it pushes your project forward; “oh hey, I have an extra RN42 BT module you can have” or “I already wrote a driver for that chip and it’s on github”. Showing your project to others can also inspire someone else to make their own project based on your awesome idea. I’ve been motivated many times to start a project because of what I saw someone else make.

Germany Too!

This Zurich meetup isn’t the only chance to connect with Hackaday in Europe. Next week, we’ll be in Berlin! We’re co-hosting a Berlin Meetup with Vintage Computer Festival organizers in the evening after Berlin Maker Faire and the Vintage Computing Festival. VCF have planned food and drink, a live band or two… chip tunes! It will be on October 3rd, and [Elliot], [Sophi] and [Bilke] will all be there.

Echo, Meet Mycroft

September 23, 2015 by 50 Comments

The Amazon Echo is an attempt to usher in a new product category. A box that listens to you and obeys your wishes. Sort of like Siri or Google Now for your house. Kickstarter creator [Joshua Montgomery] likes the idea, but he wants to do it all Open Source with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

The Kickstarter (which reached its funding goal earlier this month) claims the device will use natural language to access media, control IoT devices, and will be open both for hardware and software hacking. The Kickstarter page says that Mycroft has partnerships with Lucid and Canonical (the people behind Ubuntu). In addition, they have added stretch goals to add computer vision and Linux desktop control to Mycroft.

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Ethics In Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco

September 23, 2015 by 360 Comments

Every so often – and usually not under the best of circumstance – the field of engineering as a whole is presented with a teaching moment. Volkswagen is currently embroiled in a huge scandal involving emissions testing of 11 Million diesel cars sold in recent years. It’s a problem that could cost VW dearly, to the tune of eighteen Billion dollars in the US alone, and will, without a doubt, end the careers of more than a few Volkswagen employees. In terms of automotive scandals, this is bigger than Unsafe at Any Speed. This is a bigger scandal than the Ford Pinto’s proclivity to explode. This is engineering history in the making, and an enormously teachable moment for ethics in engineering.

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PIC24 video game

A Single-Chip Video Game Console

September 23, 2015 by 27 Comments

Ready to feel inadequate with your programming skills? You’ve been warned. Take a look at [Voja’s] single chip video game console using the PIC24. It produces the VGA signal, 5-channel sound, and is presented in a gamepad form-factor with directional pad and two buttons.

He’s been working with PIC24 for a while now generating VGA signals, and he decided it might be fun to create a 2D video game… so he decided to see if he could program a replica of the old Spectrum game Jumping Jack (play it online here).

It uses a PIC24EP512GP202 microcontroller, complete with 512K flash memory, 48k data, and a whopping 28-pins. The game, which is extremely well documented, is laid out over on his projects page. It makes our heads spin just looking at it! This is a great project to compare with the ArduinoCade from last week. Both do an amazing job of pumping out audio and video while leaving enough room for the game to actually run.

Anyway, enough talking about it — just take a look at the following demo!

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Old LISP Language Used For New Raspberry Pi OS

September 23, 2015 by 30 Comments

On the scale of awesomeness, writing an operating system ranks near the top for software hackers and ranks just below writing a whole new language. [Lukas F. Hartmann] is reaching for the epic status with the Raspberry Pi operating system dubbed Interim. In an interesting mixture of old and new, it’s written in LISP!

LISP (LISt Processing) is the second oldest high-level programming language that received wide-spread usage. The only one older is FORTRAN (FORMula TRANslation), and that is just by one year. LISP is generally associated with artificial intelligence research but it also surfaced as a utilitarian scripting language in various applications like AutoCad. You may have also heard of a more recent dialect, Clojure, which has been receiving a lot of attention.

lisp-raspberry-pi-2-thumbThe source code, an image for the Pi 2, and directions for making it all work are available. [Lukas] also describes how to get a new OS up and running on a Pi.

[Lukas] isn’t the first to create this type of system. Back in the ’70s MIT worked on a Lisp machine that led to commercially available systems. If you have an old Apple IIe around you can make it into a Lisp Machine. You can also find LISP in the Internet of Things. And then there is [kremlint] who actually scored an original LISP Machine. We’ll have to keep an eye on his progress in restoring it to working condition.

Thanks for the tip, [krs013].