Category Archives: Altera

Build one, get two: CPLD and STM32 development on a single board

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Programmable logic devices have claimed their place in the hobbyist world, with more and more projects showing up that feature either a CPLD or their bigger sibling, the FPGA. That place is rightfully earned — creating your own, custom digital circuitry not only adds flexibility, but opens up a whole new world of opportunities. However, this new realm can be overwhelming and scary at the same time. A great way to ease into this is combining the programmable logic with a general purpose MCU system that you already know and are comfortable with. [Just4Fun] did just that with the CPLD …read more

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Apple II FPGA

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[Stephen Edwards] had some time one Christmas. So he took a DE2 FPGA board and using VHDL built a pretty faithful reproduction of an Apple II+ computer. He took advantage of VHDL modules for the 6502 CPU and PS/2 keyboard, and focused more on the video hardware and disk emulation.

According to [Stephen], you can think of the Apple II as a video display that happens to have a computer in it. The master clock is a multiple of the color burst frequency, and the timing was all geared around video generation. [Stephen’s] implementation mimics the timing, although using more …read more

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Mag Lev Without The Train (But With An FPGA)

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It always surprises us that magnetic levitation seems to have two main purposes: trains and toys. It is reasonably inexpensive to get floating Bluetooth speakers, globes, or just floating platforms for display. The idea is reasonably simple, especially if you only care about levitation in two dimensions. You let an electromagnet pull the levitating object (which is, of course, ferrous). A sensor detects when the object is at a certain height and shuts off the magnet. The object falls, which turns the magnet back on, repeating the process. If you do it right, the object will reach equilibrium and hover …read more

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No Frame Buffer for FPGA VGA Graphics

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Usually, when you think of driving a VGA–in software or hardware–you think of using a frame buffer. The frame buffer is usually dual port RAM. One hardware or software process fills in the RAM and another process pulls the data out at the right rate and sends it to the VGA display (usually through a digital to analog converter).

[Connor Archard] and [Noah Levy] wanted to do some music processing with a DE2-115 FPGA board. To drive the VGA display, they took a novel approach. Instead of a frame buffer, they use the FPGA to compute each pixel’s data in …read more

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FPGA Powers Blazingly Fast LED Matrix Audio Visualizer

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[Sam Miller], [Sahil Gupta], and [Mashrur Mohiuddin] worked together on a very fast LED matrix display for their final project in ECE 5760 at Cornell University.

They started, as any good engineering students, by finding a way to make their lives easier. [Sam] had built a 32×32 LED matrix for another class. So, they made three more and ended up with a larger and more impressive 64×64 LED display.

They claim their motivation was the love of music, but we have a suspicion that the true reason was the love all EEs share for unnaturally bright LEDs; just look at …read more

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