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.

A Bitcoin Mining Example For The BeagleBone With An FPGA Shield

February 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

beaglebone-fpga-bitcoin-mining

If you’ve got a BeagleBone and an FPGA board you should give this Bitcoin mining rig a try. The hardware uses brute-force to solve hashes, looking for the rare sets that can be used as digital currency. This particular example is designed for the LOGi-bone which is an FPGA shield for the BeagleBone. But we don’t see anything that would make this difficult to use with other FPGA hardware.

We’ve seen FPGA hardware bitcoin mining in the past. It doesn’t offer as much horsepower as an array of GPUs would, but the ARM/FPGA combo can be used in a cluster in order to speed up the process. This sounds like a fun group project to take on at the local Hackerspace.

Stuffing An NES Into An FPGA

January 23, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

megaman_fpga

When the developer of the µTorrent torrent client and the ScummVM LucasArts adventure game interpreter gets bored, something cool is bound to happen. Luckily for us, [Ludde] was a bit listless over Christmas, and with more time than energy to burn, implemented a Nintendo Entertainment System on an FPGA dev board.

The NES was powered by a Ricoh 2A03 CPU, a chip nearly identical to the 6502 found in the Commodore 64s and Apple IIs of the early 1980s. There are a few differences between the two, though: the NES CPU includes an Audio Processing Unit on the chip and is connected to a very cool Picture Processing unit elsewhere on the NES. [Ludde] put all these chips in his Spartan-6 FPGA with a lot of Verilog code.

The rest of the system – the RAM, display output, and controller input comes from the peripherals attached to the FPGA dev board. [Ludde]’s specific board didn’t have a good digital to analog converter, so the composite output was traded for a VGA output. It’s not a completely accurate color pallet, but it’s still an amazing piece of work for someone who was simply bored.

Breathing Life Into An Old LCD

January 18, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

panel

Out of the depths of a junk drawer, [Alex]’s friend pulled out an old monochrome LCD display. This is an older low-resolution display from ancient electronics that unfortunately doesn’t have its own controller chip. No worries, though, because with the help of an FPGA [Alex] figured out how to drive this display.

On the back of this display are eight Hitachi LCD drivers, six column shifters and two row shifters, allowing the LCD to display a 256×128 pixel image. Without an LCD controller, though, [Alex] couldn’t just send a static image to the LCD. Instead, he had to continuously refresh the display just like a VGA monitor.

With the help of a 1500-page PDF titled Hitachi LCD Controller/Driver LSI Data Book, [Alex] was able to dump pixels into the ICs on the display with the help of a Papilio One FPGA board. A lot of work just to display the beautiful [Lena], but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hackaday Links: January 17th, 2013

January 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Free-formed VFD clock

links-free-formed-vfd-clock [James] doesn’t need a circuit board or even some protoboard to get the job done. He free-formed all the circuits for his VFD clock. Right now this is the only project hosted on his blog so click around to see how he got to this point.

DIY LED traffic light

links-diy-traffic-light

Here’s a scratch-build traffic light which [Jarle] uses to display information about his server. If you’re unable to find your own storm damaged original this is a pretty easy way to build one.

FPGA space attack game

links-classic-shooter-running-on-fpga

This game is running on an FPGA, but it’s not written in HDL. Instead, [Johan] wrote the game in C to run on a soft processor loaded on the gate array.

Hourglass entropy

links-hour-glass-entropy

This is a fascinating idea for generating random numbers. [Gijs] is shining a laser onto a light dependent transistor. The beam of the laser is broken by the falling sand of an hourglass. This technique could be use as an entropy source for random number generation.

GPS clock source for a digital timepiece

It seems like massive overkill, but you can’t beat the time accuracy of using a GPS module as a clock source. We don’t expect that [Jay] kept the clock in one piece after finishing the project. It’s just a good way to practice decoding the GPS data.

Raspi Astrophotography Board Also Does Everything Else

January 17, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

FPGA

A few years ago the folks at Astro Designs put together a board that took off-the-shelf CCD sensors from point and shoot cameras and turned them into respectable astrophotography sensors. Since then, the world has seen an explosion of Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and other microcontroller platforms, making this the perfect time for a hardware revision.

Their PiXi-200, like their previous AstroCam board, is able to take image sensors out of cameras and turn them into telescope mounted cameras. That’s only one of its tricks, though: The PiXi-200 also has accelerometers, gyroscopes, enough UARTs to do just about anything, a four channel ADC and four channel DAC, two dozen GPIO pins, enough LEDs and buttons for any project, and a 200,000 gate FPGA. All this in a board that plugs directly into the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi just like an Arduino shield. Needless to say, there’s a lot you can do with this board.

Right now, the design is still in the prototype stage, but once everything is finalized the basic model of the board will sell for £30 GBP ($50 USD). The high-end “Model C” board, with all the bells and whistles, will sell for £45 GPB ($70 USD).

Ask Hackaday: We Might Have Some FPGAs To Hack

January 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 79 Comments

rear

[Chris] is an IT guy for a medical clinic up in Alaska, and until very recently the systems he monitored, fixed, and beat with a wrench included over 100 Pano Logic “Zero Client” thin clients. Pano Logic just went out of business and all support for these little boxes have been cut off, leaving [Chris] with a hundred or so very interesting pieces of hardware.

The idea behind these “zero clients” is the ideal of a thin client – take all the storage, processing, RAM, and other goodies and move them to a server. Pano Logic took this one step further than other thin clients, removing the CPU, memory, and basically everything you’d find in a thin client. What was left was a Spartan-6 FPGA, a few chips to drive the USB ports, a pair of HDMI chips, and a few DDR2 modules. Basically, [Chris] has about 150 FPGA dev boards just sitting in a storage room. The only thing that is needed is a bunch of software and an extreme amount of cleverness.

After opening one of these zero clients, [Chris] found a Spartan-6 FPGA right next to what he thinks is a 6-pin programming port. Along with the FPGA are a few other chips that would make any FPGA dev board a very neat tool:

We’re going to agree with [Chris] these Pano Logic zero clients show a lot of potential. If you’re up to the challenge of creating a very, very cheap FPGA dev board out of some discarded hardware, head on over to ebay or chat up your local IT guy.