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Listen: Jack’s Presentation From Design West 2013

Published on May 3, 2013 by in Featured, Gadget Factory

Happy Friday, gadgetheads! We’ve got an audio treat for you today, from last week’s industry event Design West Expo 2013 in San Jose.  Our founder and CEO Jack Gassett gave his first  presentation ever, on Designing an Open Source Arduino/FPGA Development Board.  There were lots of people at the show that we recognized from the forums and website, and it was a pleasure to finally get to put names to faces.  It was great to meet you guys, so many thanks to everyone that showed up and introduced themselves!

The photo above shows Jack (left) hanging out with Raspberry Pi’s Gert van Loo (right) at the expo. Gert designed the original alpha hardware that the Raspberry Pi Model B is based on, as well as the new Gertboard. If you look closely, you’ll see (appropriately enough) Jack’s pin that says “I <3 FPGAs,” and Gert’s pin which reads “I <3 Raspberry Pi.”  Lulz and good times!

We also wound up meeting the boys behind the BeagleBone - they gave us a BeagleBone Black to check out!  We will be making a post to the blog about it in the next couple of days, so keep it here on this channel!

On to the substance. We inexplicably didn’t come up with any video from the show, but we do have an audio capture from Jack’s presentation (thankfully!) that you can get at the link below… so take it with you and listen to it podcast-style!  We also have a link to download the Powerpoint presentation from the show.

Jack’s seminar, Designing an Open Source Arduino/FPGA Development Board covers everything from the story of the Papilio hardware’s development, to the AVR8 and ZPUino Soft Processors, to some great info on the Papilio System on Chip (Schematic Editor).  Awesome show, Jack!

Powerpoint presentation – Powerpoint and Word

Audio capture from Jack’s presentation

We’d like to thank everyone that showed up to rock Design West with us, and everyone who is a part of the Gadget Factory community.  We couldn’t have gotten anywhere without you!

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Hardware And The Bitcoin Goldrush

Published on May 1, 2013 by in FPGA


Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency, best described as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin is known for its volatility – values of the currency can fluctuate wildly in a relatively short period of time. But there’s a virtual goldrush going on these days for the stuff, and the tools used to get at the gold include everything from high-end graphics cards to FPGAs to ASIC-based Bitcoin mining rigs.

There’s an interesting article up at DesignSpark about the very in-vogue Bitcoin madness and the hardware that some folks are using to get their share. You guys should take a minute to check it out!

There’s a new gold rush, but this time the tools of choice are algorithms and HDL skills instead of pick axes and pans, and machines not people are doing the mining.

Bitcoin, the decentralised digital currency, has barely been out of the news of late and in recent days it reached a new high value of $266 before proceeding to plummet to under $100 — an event which has been attributed to a significant surge in interest and much increased media coverage.

Learn more: Bitcoin (Wikipedia)

Do any of you have any experience with this whole Bitcoin thing? We’d love to hear your story – hit us up in the comments!

(via DesignSpark)

 
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Turbografx-16 Game Console Recreated On FPGA

Published on April 29, 2013 by in FPGA


Remember the Turbografx-16 (PC Engine in Japan) video game console from the early 1990s?  I used to love playing Bonk’s Adventure on that thing.  FPGA hacker and nostalgic gamer Gregory decided to recreate the Turbografx-16 hardware within an FPGA and it seems to be working pretty well!  Aah, brings me back.

For this project, it looks like he’s using an Altera DE-1 FPGA board, and he says that he’s been able to recreate all three of the main chips from the original hardware.  At this stage in the project he’s able to store TG-16 game ROMs in the flash memory of the DE-1, and plans to add ROM loading from an SD card soon.

Gregory, the man behind the FPGA-based Turbografx 16 clone, struggled for three months to get the gear working the way he wanted.  Now that he’s largely finished, he can render and play any Turbografx 16 game he can get his hands on.  The clone loads ROMs in on-board flash memory, and you can supply ROMs to the system using SD card.  He hasn’t managed to get sound working just yet, but he does say he has plans for that in the near future.

(via Geek.com)

 
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The Basics You’ll Need To Start Hacking With FPGAs

Published on April 26, 2013 by in FPGA

It’s well known that FPGAs can be difficult to get started with, to the point of being downright intimidating.  We’re always on the lookout for information that can help make the learning curve a little less… curvy.   Today we’ve got an easy-to-follow information compilation for understanding FPGAs and how they work, courtesy of FPGAhacker.  Let’s just call it some background info that everyone who is looking to get into FPGA hacking will need to understand.

Some of the key knowledge for learning FPGAs includes Boolean algebra, circuitry, combinational logic, and all the binary you can handle.  Thankfully, FPGAhacker has addressed each of these concepts and how they are used in an FPGA as a whole.  Even if you are a veteran FPGA hacker, it’s still worth a quick review session.

A Field Programmable Gate Array is a Gate Array ASIC that has a matrix of metallization laid out already on the silicon, but the connections between the stripes of metal aren’t electrically connected yet. There are a number of ways these connections can be made, and the exact nature is going to be proprietary. The act of making these connections is called programming, as you may have gathered from the name. Depending on the type of the FPGA, the act of programming can be a permanent one time act. More often, the connections are temporary, and the FPGA makes use of a memory such as SRAM or flash, to store the connection information (referred to as the FPGAs configuration).

So there ya go! Here’s the link: Getting Into FPGA Hacking Series, parts 1 – 4.

(via FPGAhacker)

 
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FPGA-Powered Visual MIDI Music Composition Tool

Published on April 24, 2013 by in FPGA


Here’s a great FPGA final project from Cornell University student Joao Diogo Faloao. It is a visual MIDI-based musical composition tool running on an Altera DE-2 FPGA board. This one’s going to appeal to a very small subset of people – those trained to read and write musical notation, and who also have a pretty good working knowledge of FPGAs. If you don’t fit into that tiny little niche, don’t worry. That’s why there’s a video!

Project creator Joao describes his vision in a nutshell:

For this Project I developed a Visual Music Composer and player on an Altera DE2 FPGA board. In order to create a fluid user interface some peripherals had to be interfaced with the board, like a Keyboard, VGA display and speakers. With this peripherals the system is able to play music composed by the user and convert it to a Midi file that is stored in the SRAM on the board.

Joao has set the interface up so that a computer keyboard is used to select the rhythmic value of the note (from whole note/rest – 64th note/rest). Once the value is selected, the note can be placed anywhere on the staff (determines pitch/frequency of the note). When your musical composition is done, it is saved in the FPGA’s SRAM memory and can then be played back by hitting enter on the keyboard.

I think it could be even better if it had support for a MIDI controller keyboard, so rather than entering your notes with the computer keyboard, you could just play the notes naturally on your controller keyboard and they would show up on the musical staff onscreen. Of course, there are already commercial products available that can do this (check out Sibelius, for example).  For a student project on an FPGA though, this ain’t bad at all. Great job!

You can check out Joao’s full project page here.

(via Cornell University student project pages)

 
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Robotic Arm Controlled In Realtime Using FPGA

Published on April 22, 2013 by in FPGA


FPGA and robotics enthusiast ZaIoNeL has created a grasping, clamping robotic arm that has six degrees of freedom alongside a spherical wrist for maximum dexterity. On the hardware front, he’s using a keyboard, two Altera FPGAs, two Xbee modules, power supply, and of course the robotic arm.

The robo-arm project uses a couple of Altera FPGA boards and a wireless control system using a system-on-chip. This consists of a NIOS processor, an SPI module to communicate with the sensors, and a serial communication module to receive wireless commands sent from a remote controller.

From the project description:

The choice of using FPGA technology is driven by the need to create: A real time control system, to process required algorithms in a minimum time; An embedded system, in order to decrease the cost of the application in terms of both energy and space (required by the use of a personal computer), and to improve overall performance than using a banal microcontroller.

(via YouTube)

 
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Implementing SPI & I2C Interfaces On Papilio One

Published on April 19, 2013 by in Papilio


Papilio user and tech blogger Duane Benson from All Programmable Planet has a new article on his ongoing quest to create his own robotic tele-presence avatar. This one is about implementing SPI and I2C interfaces on his Papilio One for the project.

Duane’s avatar will need a series of motors and sensor controls for various functions; these will be communicating via I2C. Also, some of the robot’s sensors will require an SPI interface. In his article, Duane explains what he intends to do to hash out the details of getting these systems working. Goals for this phase of building the avatar are laid out below:

I’ve already gotten the slave motor drivers working with MCUs in command, so I know they work, which means I can concentrate on making sure I get the FPGA code right. So, here’s the plan (we’ll call it “Plan A” so no one gets confused):

•The FPGA will be the master for both my I2C and SPI interfaces

•My first implementation will be in my Papilio One FPGA development board

•At some point, I’ll port everything to my ZedBoard

•I’ll create a state machine at the heart of my I2C engines (maybe update the SPI too)

•The first incarnation will just send commands to my motor drivers

•Following that, I’ll start receiving data from my sensors

Duane goes into more detail, as well as some code in his article, so be sure to take a look for a much more in-depth view of what he’s up to. It’s always great to see the Papilio being put to creative use in these projects. Keep us updated on your progess, Duane!

(via All Programmable Planet)

 
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Jack Gasset To Give Tech Tour Of Papilio @ Design West 2013

Published on April 18, 2013 by in Gadget Factory


Today we’ve got a very special engagement to let you all in on. The man behind the curtain, Gadget Factory founder Jack Gassett will be giving a tech talk about the Papilio platform at the upcoming industry convention Design West Expo 2013 out in Silicon Valley, California. The Design West Expo is an industry-leading event, slated to run from April 22-25 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.

Jack will be speaking on Designing an Open Source Arduino/FPGA Development Board; the seminar will be held Wednesday, April 24, 2013 from 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM at the Salon 4 designation in the convention center. Our COO Kalesh Weaver will also be in attendence at the event.

In this session, the creator of the Papilio – Inventor Jack Gassett –will present a technical tour describing how the system is implemented and discuss the design decisions he made along the way. Also discussed will be the ways in which users can plug their own peripherals into the system using VHDL or schematic entry; also how users can take existing cores from sites like OpenCores.com and integrate them into the Papilio’s Arduino soft processor core.

WE’D LOVE TO SEE YOU THERE! If you plan on attending, please let us know – Jack was telling me that we can plan a Gadget Factory get-together for all who show to the expo! Also, Design West is offering some special promotions for friends of Gadget Factory that will get you a huge discount (over $800.00 off) on all-access passes to Design West. You’ll need to register here using the PROMO CODE: SP100.

Here’s an overview of the event from the Design West main site:

Design West is the world’s only technical conference and expo for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals who create products with electronic content. Held in the heart of Silicon Valley, it is where the world’s top design engineers and product developers gather and learn, gain inspiration, and get practical information and hands-on training they can put to immediate use.

More info:

Again, please let us know if you plan to attend, and we hope to see you guys there! For those that cannot attend, stay tuned to the blog – we’ll try to cover what we can here!

 
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