fpga

551 Articles

Recreating The Mac Plus With An FPGA

September 16, 2011 by 16 Comments

sad_mac_fpga_mac_clone_plustoo

[Steve] over at Big Mess O’ Wires has never been so happy to see the “Sad Mac” icon.

A little over a month ago, he decided to take on the task of building his own Mac clone using modern technology. Not to be confused with Mac emulation on modern hardware, he is attempting to build a true Mac clone using an FPGA that is functionally identical to the original.

He is calling his creation the “PlusToo”, with the goal of producing a modern version of the Macintosh Plus. The Plus shares a good amount of hardware with its other original Mac brethren, allowing him to replicate any of the other machines such as the Mac 128K, with a few simple configuration changes.

Building this clone is an incredible undertaking, and it’s a lot of fun to watch the construction progress bit by bit. [Steve] has been diligently working for a little over a month now, recently getting the clone to run 68000 code from the Mac ROM, resulting in the Sad Mac image you see above. While the logo has been dreaded among Mac users for years, it signals to [Steve] that things are coming along nicely.

SPDIF Passthrough Lets You Digitally Manipulate The Audio

September 16, 2011 by 5 Comments

[Mike Field] took what he had learned with a few past projects and combined them to make this FPGA-based SPDIF audio pass-through. In order to get the SPDIF signal ready for the FPGA he needed a few components to use for level conversion. Once everything was connected he used a first in first out (FIFO) buffer to ensure that the outgoing bitrate is the same as the input, while still allowing enough time for the FPGA to do some digital manipulation.

This reminds us of the NeTV, which is an HDMI pass-through device. That one allows you to overlay your own video information to any TV that has an HDMI port. This would allow you patch into any audio system that’s using SPDIF, letting you inject your own audio, such as a paging system in a public lobby, or the ringing of a phone when you get a call, or to create your own sounds.

We like his overhand knot cable management system to keep those jumper wires from becoming too much of a mess on the breadboard.

Chumby’s New NeTV Makes Almost ‘any TV’ Into An Internet Connected Device

September 12, 2011 by 40 Comments

Check out the new set-top box on the block, the NeTV from Chumby Industries. That link will take you to their video demonstration of the device, which is a humble-looking black box with no apparent user interface. You’ll see a few cool tricks that may impress you, like pairing the device with an Android phone through the use of a QR code. Once the two have mated you can do things like share images on the TV and load webpages from addresses entered into the smart phone. There are options for scrolling alerts when you receive an IM or SMS, and a few other bells and whistles. All of this from a device which connects with two HDMI ports to sit between your TV and whatever feeds it a video signal. Read all about the features here.

But its the hacking potential that really gets our juices flowing. The developer page gives us a look inside at the Spartan-6 FPGA that lives in the little case. We don’t often quote [Dave Jones] but we’re certain he’d call this thing ‘sex on a stick’. They’ve made the schematic and FPGA information available and are just begging for you to do your worst. The power for the device is provided by a USB connection but curiously is just above spec when drawing a max of 700 mA. We have a USB port on the back of our TV and would love to velcro this thing in place and power it from that. What would you plan to do with it?

[via Reddit]

Putting Laptop LCDs To Use With An FPGA

September 9, 2011 by 29 Comments

We’re always impressed with the number of laptop displays we’re able to pick out of the trash. Most of the time the computer is borked beyond repair so we end up with a lot of functional but unusable LCD panels. As a service to us all, [EiNSTeiN_] figured out how to control an LCD panel using a cheap homebrew FPGA board.

LCD panels don’t use a simple protocol like VGA for turning pixels on and off. Instead, the very high-speed LVDS is used. LVDS is beyond the capabilities of simple microprocessors, so [EiNSTeiN_] built himself a clone of an XuLA FPGA prototyping board and set to work. After figuring out the signal lines to the panel, [EiNSTeiN_] pored over the timing diagrams for the LVDS controller and the LCD panel. From the data sheets, he figured out data is usually sent to the panel at about 500 MHz. The homebrew FPGA board couldn’t manage that speed so [EiNSTeiN_] cut the FPGA clock in half.

While LCD’s 60 fps refresh rate was reduced to 30 fps, [EiNSTeiN_] says there’s only a little flicker. Not bad for something that could have easily been trashed.

Recovering Data For A Homemade Cray

September 8, 2011 by 41 Comments

In our hubris, we pat ourselves on the back when we’re able to pull data off our old SCSI drives. [Chris Fenton]’s attempt to get an OS for a homebrew Cray-1 puts us rightfully to shame.

Last year we saw [Chris]’ fully functional 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer built around FPGA. While the reproduction was nearly cycle-accurate, [Chris] hasn’t had an opportunity to test out his system because of the lack of available Cray software. A former Cray employee heard of his plight and loaned an 80 Megabyte CDC 9877 disk pack to in the hope of getting some system software.

[Chris] acquired a monstrous 100 pound disk drive to read the disk pack, but after 30 years in storage a lot of electrical problems cropped up. Since reading the drive digitally proved to be an exercise in futility, [Chris] hit upon the idea of taking analog data straight from the read head. This left him with a magnetic image of the disk pack that was ready for some data analysis.

After the disk image was put up on the Internet, the very talented [Yngve AAdlandsvik] figured out the data, header, and error correction formats and sent [Chris] a Python script to tease bits from the analog image. While no one is quite sure what is on the disk pack provided by the Cray employee, [Chris] is remarkably close to bringing the Cray-1 OS back from the dead. There’s also a great research report [Chris] wrote as penance for access to the CDC disk drive. Any Hack A Day readers feel like looking over the data and possibly giving [Chris] a hand?

FPGA Bitcoin Miner Is Probably The Most Power Efficient.

August 22, 2011 by 62 Comments

[fpgaminer], [li_gangyi], and [newMeat1] have been working together for the last few months to build an FPGA bitcoin miner that blows GPU mining rigs out of the water in terms of power efficiency. The board requires only 6.8 watts for 100 Mhashes/second, but [li_gangyi]’s blog says the team expects to hit 150-200 Mhashes with some improvements. That’s efficiency GPUs can’t touch.

Bitcoins are a digital currency that are ‘mined’ by calculating hashes that verify bitcoin transactions. While mining operations can be performed on a CPU, graphics cards and FPGAs beat CPUs by several orders of magnitude in terms of how many hashes can be performed per second.

The heart of the board is a Spartan-6 LX150 FPGA – a pricey bit of kit – and the team is selling each board for $440 USD. For that amount of money, you could buy two ATI 6770s at half the price and crunch four times as many hashes a second. At less than 7 watts, though, we wouldn’t worry too much about cooling the rig and the electricity costs will be very low.

Largest LED Cube We’ve Ever Seen Is Still Only Half Complete

August 14, 2011 by 35 Comments

[Brendan Vercoelen] is a university student in New Zealand studying engineering. He says his recent gigantic LED cube build, “isn’t very serious” compared to other student projects, but that doesn’t mean it’s not impressive. The original plan for the build was a 16x16x16 tri-color LED cube. After realizing how much soldering that really was, [Brendan] scaled back his design a little to a 16x16x8 cubeoid, but the other half can be attached when the project is complete.

From the cost breakdown, [Brendan] only spent about $550 USD – far less expensive than we expected. The most expensive item was the 4,000+ Red-Green-Orange tri-color LEDs. The largest LED cubes (1, 2, 3) we’ve covered have maxed out at 8x8x8, or 512 total LEDS. Even though [Brendan]’s build is only half done, it’s still four times larger in volume than the largest LED cube we’ve seen.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. This is the one to beat, folks. Check out a video of the cube after the break.

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