Dancing Mandelbrot Set On A FPGA

May 26, 2015 by Eric Evenchick 23 Comments

This FPGA based build creates an interesting display which reacts to music. [Wancheng’s] Dancing Mandelbrot Set uses an FPGA and some math to generate a controllable fractal display.

The build produces a Mandelbrot Set with colours that are modified by an audio input. The Terasic DE2-115 development board, which hosts a Cyclone IV FPGA, provides all the IO and processing. On the input side, UART or an IR remote can be used to zoom in and out on the display. An audio input maps to the color control, and a VGA output allows for the result to be displayed in real time.

On the FPGA, a custom calculation engine, running at up to 150 MHz, does the math to generate the fractal. A Fast Fourier transform decomposes the audio input into frequencies, which are used to control the colors of the output image.

This build is best explained by watching, so check out the video after the break.

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Real Time Video Anonymizer

May 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

If you’re wondering, Cornell is just like every other university in one respect: the grad students are starving, and wherever there is free food, students circle like vultures. The engineering and CS departments have a mailing list alerting people to free food, but a more automated solution was desired. The first web cam ever was used to notify grad students if a coffee pot was full, but Cornell shot down this idea on the basis of privacy concerns.

It’s final project time for [Bruce Land]’s courses, and a project by [Ferian Chen] and [Sean Ogden] solved the privacy concerns of a webcam in a kitchen. It’s a real-time video anonymizer, that can also be used to livestream ransom demands if you’re so inclined.

There are actually two parts to this project. The first part pixellates faces and any other skin tone, just like you’d see on a true crime TV show. This part of the project was based on an FPGA-based face detection project. ‘Skin’ pixels are defined as having a difference between the red and green channels within a certain range. With the right lighting, it works very well.

You can identify someone with their voice, too, so [Ferian] and [Sean] also made efforts to disguise hungry student’s voices as well. This was done with a phase vocoder that changes the pitch of someone’s voice, but not the spectral characteristics. The result should have been an audio channel that can’t be pinned down to one person, but is still recognizable as speech. The audio processing didn’t work as intended, with noticeable artifacts in the output. There’s still some work to be done, and now that [Ferian] and [Sean] aren’t checking the kitchen every ten minutes, the might have the time to do it.

FPGAs Keep Track Of Your Ping Pong Game

May 15, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

It’s graduation time, and you know what that means! Another great round of senior design projects doing things that are usually pretty unique. [Bruce Land] sent in a great one from Cornell where the students have been working on a project that uses FPGAs and a few video cameras to keep score of a ping-pong game.

The system works by processing a live NTSC feed of a ping pong game. The ball is painted a particular color to aid in detection, and the FPGAs that process the video can keep track of where the net is, how many times the ball bounces, and if the ball has been hit by a player. With all of this information, the system can keep track of the score of the game, which is displayed on a monitor near the table. Now, the players are free to concentrate on their game and don’t have to worry about keeping score!

This is a pretty impressive demonstration of FPGAs and video processing that has applications beyond just ping pong. What would you use it for? It’s always interesting to see what students are working on; core concepts from these experiments tend to make their way into their professional lives later on. Maybe they’ll even take this project to the next level and build an actual real, working ping pong robot to work with their scoring system!

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Racing The Beam With Super Hexagon

May 13, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Early game consoles like the Atari 2600 had a very, very limited amount of RAM. There wasn’t even enough RAM for all the pixels on the screen; instead, pixels were generated by the CPU as they were being drawn. It’s playing with scanlines and colorbusts with code, something we’re now calling. ‘racing the beam’ for some reason.

[Sam] is in the middle of an EE degree right now, and for a digital design class he needed to write some Verilog. At the time he was addicted to the game Super Hexagon, and the game mechanics are simple enough for an FPGA. He built his own implementation, but not one with framebuffers. He’s using a pipelined approach where each pixel’s value is calculated just a few clock cycles before it’s displayed. It vastly reduces the memory requirements, on his Altera DE1 board compared to the framebuffer approach.

Video below.

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Xilinx Borrows Code For Their Own Devices

May 12, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

Back in 2012, [tmbinc] discovered a neat little undocumented feature in the Xilinx ISE: the ability to use TCP/IP instead of JTAG cables. [tmbinc] was working on an Open Hardware USB analyzer and discovered the nearly undocumented Xilinx Virtual Cable, a single ‘shift’ command that opens up a TCP connection and sends JTAG data out to another computer on the network. It’s extraordinarily useful, [tmbinc] wrote a daemon for this tool, and everything was right with the world.

Yesterday, [tmbinc] discovered the Xilinx Virtual Cable again, this time in one of Xilinx’s Github repos. The code was extraordinarily familiar, and looking closer at a few of the revisions, he saw it was very similar to code he had written three years ago.

The offending revision in the Xilinx repo is nearly identical to [tmbinc]’s Xilinx Virtual Cable Driver daemon. Variable names are the same, the variables are declared in the same order, and apart from whitespace, code conventions are the same. This is not to say someone at Xilinx stole code from [tmbinc], but if this were a computer science lab, there would be an academic disciplinary hearing. What’s worse, Xilinx plastered their copyright notice at the top of the code.

In an issue [tmbinc] raised, he said he was flattered, but clarified that his code was developed entirely from scratch. He believes the Xilinx code was derived from his own code written three years ago. Since [tmbinc]’s code was uploaded without a license, it defaulted to All Rights Reserved. This does not bode well for the Xilinx legal department.

In any event, you really, really have to wonder what Xilinx’s internal documentation looks like if a random person on the Internet can discover a barely-documented protocol, write a daemon, put it on the Internet, and have someone at Xilinx use that code.

Thanks to the anonymous tipster for sending this into the Hackaday tip jar.

FPGA Based Ambilight Clone

April 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

The Philips Ambilight – a bunch of rear-facing RGB LEDs taped to the back of a TV – is becoming the standard project for anyone beginning to tinker with FPGAs. [DrX]’s is the best one we’ve seen yet, with a single board that reads and HDMI stream, makes blinkey lights go, and outputs the HDMI stream to the TV or monitor.

[DrX] is using an FPGA development board with two HDMI connectors – the Scarab miniSpartan6+ – and a strand of WS2801 individually addressable RGB LEDs for this project. With a bit of level shifting, driving the LEDs was easily taken care of. But what about decoding HDMI?

Most of the project is borrowed from a project that displays a logo in the corner of a 720p video stream. The hardware is the same, but for an Ambilight clone, you need to read the video stream and process it, not just write to it. By carefully keeping track of the R, G, and B values for each pixel along with the pixel clock, the colors along the edge of a display can be averaged. It’s not as difficult or as memory-intensive as building a frame buffer; nearly all of the picture data is thrown out when assembling the averages around the perimeter of the display. It does work, though.

After figuring out the average color around the perimeter of the display, it’s just a simple matter of driving the LEDs. Tape those LEDs to the back of a TV, and there’s an Ambilight clone, made with an FPGA.

[DrX] has a few videos of his project in action. You can check those out below.

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VCF East X: The World’s Largest USB Thumb Drive

April 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

The Vintage Computer Festival last weekend featured racks and racks of old minicomputers, enough terminals for an entire lab, and enough ancient storage devices to save a YouTube video. These storage devices – hard disks, tape readers, and 8″ disk drives – were only connected to vintage hardware, with one exception: a DEC RL02 drive connected to a modern laptop via USB.

The DEC RL02 drive is the closest you’re going to get to a modern mechanical hard drive with these old machines. It’s a huge rack unit with removable platters that can hold 10 Megabytes of storage. [Chris] found one of these old drives and because he wanted to get into FPGA development, decided to create a USB adapter for this huge, old drive.

The hardware isn’t too terribly complex, with a microcontroller and an FPGA that exposes the contents of the drive over USB mass storage. For anyone trying to bootstrap a PDP-11 or -8 system, [Chris] could download disk images from the Internet, write them to the disk, and load up the contents of the drive from the minicomputer. Now, he’s using it with SimH to have a physical drive for an emulated system, but the controller really doesn’t care about what format the disk pack is in. If [Chris] formatted a disk pack with a FAT file system, he would have the world’s largest and heaviest USB thumb drive in the world.

Video below.

Update: As promised, [Chris] put all the code in a git

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