Pumping 1080p Video Out Of An FPGA

March 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

fpga-pumping-1080p

[Hamster] admits this 1080p HDMI hack for an FPGA doesn’t put a signal that’s fully up to specifications. But as you can see in the image above it does output a 1920×1080 image at 60 Hz, which is the size and frequency of full HD video. It falls just short due to some jitter, which may be just fine if this is only being used for early prototyping and will be replaced with a dedicated encoder later in the design process.

Here he’s chosen a Pipistrello board but thinks that any device which has a Spartan 6 chip with the differential pairs connected to an HDMI socket will work. The difficulty of the task comes in serializing four output channels at 1500 Mb/s each. Because of this just coding your logic isn’t going to work. After roughing out the design [Hamster] went back in and chose to manually place some of the components to ensure that data from each channel arrives at the same time.

While you’re messing with HDMI you may also want to give this overlay hack a try.

Dynamic Bicycle Headlight Uses The Open Road As A Display

March 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

This thing is so cool it almost looks fake. But [Matt Richardson] isn’t a hoaxster. He actually built what might be called a heads-down display for your bicycle. He refers to it as a headlight because it borrows a similar function. It mounts on the handlebars and shoots light off the front of the bike. But it’s more than just a battery and a bulb, this uses a pico-projector to give that light some meaning. In the video after the break he shows it off on the streets of NYC.

So far he’s only displaying information that has to do with the speed of travel, but the proof is there just waiting for a brilliant new use. Feeding the projector is a Raspberry Pi board. For this prototype [Matt] mounted it, along with the portable cellphone charger which plays the role of the power source, on a hunk of hardboard strapped inside the bike frame.

If you’re thinking of doing this one yourself beware of the BOM price tag. That projector he’s using runs upwards of $400. We wonder if you could hack together a rudimentary replacement with an old cellphone screen and this diy film projector?

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Soldering Small Components For A Video DA

February 10, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

Video distribution amplifiers are used to amplify a video signal and split it into multiple outputs so multiple displays can be driven. They are also used to correct the gain of an incoming video signal. [Andrew] was having trouble with the video signal from an interferometer, and found the issue was caused by a low output gain. His solution was to build his own video distribution amplifier.

The THS7374 appeared to be the perfect chip for this application. It’s a four channel video amplifier IC, and only requires a few passive components to run. The only problem was the package: a 14 pin TSSOP with 0.65 mm pitch. Not fun to solder by hand, especially if you don’t have a PCB.

[Andrew]’s solution was to build his own breakout out of copper-clad board. He worked under a microscope and cut out a pattern for the part, then soldered 30 AWG wire to the pins to make connections. After cleaning off any copper that could cause a short, the board was working, and the video waveform looked great on an oscilloscope.

After testing, even more gain was needed. [Andrew] ended up cascading two of the amplifiers. This method of prototyping doesn’t look easy, but could be worth it when you need a single board.

A WiFi Controlled RC Car With An IP Camera

January 8, 2013 by Jeremy Cook 11 Comments

Controlling your car over WiFi is good, but mounting a webcam on it so you can actually see where you’re going is even better. [Michael] goes over how he made his wifi car with some great videos in the post about it.

The car used is a seemingly standard RC unit, which came with a speed controller that was recycled for network use. [Michael] removed the standard radio, but having this controller available kept him from having to engineer an H-bridge circuit. The radio was then replaced with a WiFi module from Sparkfun.

There were a few problems with the IP camera to begin with, as the lag was originally unbearable. After some tricks that would qualify as a good hack in itself, the camera was eventually able to perform on an acceptable level and output data to the FLTK app he used to control everything. Check out one of his videos below of this car in action. Continue reading “A WiFi Controlled RC Car With An IP Camera” →

Adding An LCD Screen Terminal For TP-Link Routers

January 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Routers running embedded Linux offer quite a bit of power depending on what you need to do. To extend the usefulness of his TP-Link router [Roman] built a rig that adds an LCD screen to display the terminal. But it ended up being quite a bit more powerful than that.

The first portion of the project was to build a USB video card for the display. [Roman] went with an STM32 development board which resolves the USB device end with the QVGA screen driver (translated). This seems like it would be the lion’s share of the project, but he still needed a driver on the router to interface with the device. This thrust him into the world of USB-class drivers (translated). It even included building graphics support into the kernel of OpenWRT. The final piece of the puzzle was to write a frame buffer (translated) that would help regulate the output to the screen. The result works so well he is even able to play games using ScummVM. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

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Pulling The LCD Screens Out Of A MyVu Glasses Display

December 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

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[John Floren] really sells us on a pair of MyVu 301 Video Glasses. He lists the features as being bulky, ugly, and uncomfortable. That’s the reason why he’s showing you how to crack open the glasses in order to steal the tiny LCD modules.

The LCD screen for each eye is mounted inside of the assembly seen above. The screen is perpendicular to the wearer’s eye, with some space in the body to facilitate the lens and reflector that enlarge the image and direct it toward the eye. After removing the display from the module [John] tried to hook it up to a camera via the driver hardware which comes with the glasses. It must have been a bit of a head scratcher that all he could get was a plain white image. This is fixed by finding the polarizing filter inside the module and laying it over the screen. This is demonstrated in the clip after the break.

We don’t know where he’s planning to go from here, but we can suggest a few different projects. This hardware could be useful in creating his own augmented reality hat. Using it as a video game controller is another thing that pops to mind. Wouldn’t it be cool to have this in the scope sight of a light gun?

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Two Computer Vision Builds From Cornell

December 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

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[Bruce Land], professor at Cornell, is a frequent submitter to our tip line. Usually he sends in a few links every semester from undergraduate electronics courses. Now the fall semester is finally over and it’s time to move on to the more ambitious master’s projects.

First up is a head-mounted eye tracker, [Anil Ram Viswanathan] and [Zelan Xiao] put together a lightweight and low-cost eye tracking project that will record where the user is looking.

The eye tracker hardware is made of two cameras mounted on a helmet. The first camera faces forward, looking at the same thing the user is. The second camera is directed towards the user’s eye. A series of algorithms detect the iris of the user’s eye and overlays the expected gaze position on the output of the first camera. Here’s the design report. PDF, natch.

Next up is a face tracking project implemented on an FPGA. This project started out as a software implementation of a face tracking algorithm in MATLAB. [Thu-Thao Nguyen] translated this MATLAB code to Verilog and eventually got her hardware running on an FPGA dev board. Another design report.

Having a face detection and tracking system running on an FPGA is extremely interesting; the FPGA makes face tracking a very low power and hopefully lower-cost solution, allowing it to be used in portable and consumer devices.

You can check out the videos for these projects after the break.

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