Disco Isn’t Dead: Diy Dance Floor Spotted At Student Parties

June 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Your party is lame if it doesn’t include interactive blinking lights on the dance floor. [Mario] and [Lukas] didn’t want to have lame parties, so they enlisted some fellow students to build an interactive dance floor (translated). The finished party-piece is 4 meters by 2.5 meters (that’s about 13’x8′ for us yanks) and includes 160 lighted squares. But it’s the electronics that really make this a heavy project.

Milled into the underside of the pressboard base are a series of pockets and channels to hold various components. If you look hard enough, you’re going to find eight AVR microcontrollers which control the LEDs, 8 CPLDs to manage the weight sensors which make the floor interactive, and an FPGA and embedded computer to tie everything together. It’s movable, a hit at parties, and so far it seems to hold up to the occasional spilled beverage.

You can’t share a project like this without some video. See it after the break.

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FPGA Mandelbrot Fractal Engine

June 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 24 Comments

fpga_mandelbrot

[Mike Field] has always been interested in the Mandelbrot Set since he first read about it back in the ‘80s. Having coded it on a Commodore VIC20 back int he day, he always returned to the Mandelbrot set when he wanted to try out some new programming technology.

He wanted to delve deeper into the world of FPGAs, so [Mike] figured the best way to do so would be to use one to program a Mandelbrot fractal engine. He started out with a goal of creating a 640×480 Mandelbrot display, but over time, he found that he could push his Nexus 2 FPGA to 800×600. He didn’t stop there, and after tweaking a few things, he was amazed to find that he could push a 1024×768 display from the small board.

He kept a pretty detailed log as he went along, should you be interested in trying your hand at the process as well. Though there is no video of the FPGA in action, there are a few cool pictures showing off his handiwork.

Simple VGA Interface For Tiny FPGA Boards

June 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

fpga_vga_adapter

[devb] has been playing around with XESS FPGA boards for ages, and as long as he can remember, they have had built-in VGA interfaces. His newest acquisition, a XuLA FPGA board, doesn’t have any external parts or ports aside from a USB connector. He needed to get video output from the board, so he decided to build a VGA interface himself.

He prototyped a 512-color VGA interface board which worked just fine, but he thought it would be way too cumbersome to use for each and every project. To keep life simple, he designed a small PCB that integrates a VGA connector and all of the resistors he needed to get the signal from the FPGA. His boards plug directly into a breadboard, so only a handful of wires is needed to connect the FPGA to a monitor.

As you can see on his site, the adapter works quite well, allowing the FPGA to put out a crisp 800×600 image with little fuss. [devb] has also posted all of his design files on his site in Eagle format for anyone interested in replicating his work.

FPGA-based Turbografx 16 Clone

April 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 4 Comments

[Gregory] wrote in to share his most recent project, an FPGA clone of the PC Engine/Turbografx 16 console. You may remember him from last year, when we talked about his SEGA Genesis FPGA clone. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone, and decided to resurrect yet another 16-bit machine in FPGA form.

He has been working on the project for about three months now, but he has been making very quick work of getting everything up and running. As of a few weeks ago, the project was in a pretty unstable alpha stage, but after pounding away at some bugs, he is now able to render any game he pleases.

The clone uses an Altera DE1 board just like his previous builds, and he has been able to emulate all three if the main chips that make up the Turbografx logic board. He has yet to work on the Programmable Sound Generator, but that is slated for the near future. While the FPGA currently stores ROMS in its flash memory, he has plans to add the ability to load games from an SD card.

Keep reading to see a pair of videos showing his console clone in action, it’s impressive.

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Sequencer Built On A Cycle II FPGA Board

April 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Matt’s] finishing up his computer science degree. As part of a class assignment he programmed his own sequencer which runs on a Cyclone-II FPGA development board. We’ve embedded a video below the fold that shows you what it can do. The buttons and LEDs offered on the board actually allowed him to create a nice user interface. Each slide switch has a surface mount LED above it, giving feedback for which beats in the loop are on and off. There’s also a bank of momentary-push buttons seen in blue above. [Matt] uses these to tweak settings like the pitch that is stored for each slide switch. He even puts on a light show with the VGA output.

We’ve seen this Altera board before, used to drive a falling sands game. The hardware will run you around $200 but that’s not bad considering all of the fun things you can do with it.

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Simulating VHDL Of An AVR8 Soft Processor

April 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Okay, now we’re beginning to feel a bit like [Alice]. This tutorial shows you how to simulate VHDL code. This code is intended to run on an FPGA and includes a software-only version of the AVR 8-bit microcontroller core. Essentially, you’ll simulate VHDL code that simulates AVR hardware. Wrap your mind around that!

The code is intended to run on a Papilio Field Programmable Gate Array development board. We saw an early version of this board running the AVR8 core about a year ago. However, you don’t need to have any hardware to follow along and recreate this simulation yourself. It might be a great way to get your feet wet with FPGA programming before making that first hardware buy. Five different screencasts take you through the process of getting the AVR8 code, using an altered Arduino IDE for it, setting up a free version of Xilinx ISE to run the simulation, then setting it free and interpreting the data that the simulator spits out the other end.

Gameduino

March 2, 2011 by Kevin Dady 19 Comments

Gameduino is an FPGA based sound and graphics adapter for microcontrollers. Laid out as an Arduino shield, all it really takes is a microcontroller with SPI and some code to send commands to the board which lets you toggle registers, handle memory, and drawing functions.

Once the data gets there, it is greeted by a Xilinx FPGA which puts out a 800×600 72Hz SVGA sync signal, large 512×512 pixel character scrolling backgrounds, piles of 16×16 (up to 256 color) sprites, each with per pixel transparency, rotation, flip, and if that was not enough a 12 bit frequency synth that can do 16 independent voices.

All the resources to make one of these is listed on the site under the Making a Gameduino link, but if youre interested in getting a made board there is also a kickstarter page available. There are other ways to squeeze video out of micro controllers from the basic like hackvision to AVGA or even Lucidscience AVR VGA v2, and tons of propeller projects, but this one being stand alone and portable, has a certain appeal.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

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