Category Archives: FPGA

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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386 Too Much Horsepower? Try a 186, in an FPGA!

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Typically when we hear the term “System-on-Chip” bandied around, our mind jumps straight to modern ARM-based processors that drive smartphones and embedded devices around us. Coming a little bit more out of left field is [Jamie]’s 80186 core, that runs on Intel FPGAs.

[Jamie] has implemented the entire set of 80186 instructions in Verilog, and included some of the undocumented instructions too. This sort of attention to detail is important – real world parts don’t always meet the original specifications on paper, and programmers can come to rely on this. The key to compatibility is understanding how things perform in …read more

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Immersive VR with a 200-Degree Stereoscopic Camera

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VR is in vogue, but getting on board requires a steep upfront cost. Hackaday.io user [Colin Pate] felt that $800 was a bit much for even the cheapest commercial 360-degree 3D camera, so he thought: ‘why not make my own for half that price?’

[Pate] knew he’d need a lot of bandwidth and many GPIO ports for the camera array, so he searched out the Altera Cyclone V SOC FPGA and a Terasic DE10-Nano development board to host it. At present, he has four Uctronics OV5642 cameras on his rig, chosen for their extensive documentation and support. The camera mount …read more

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FPGA Metastability Solutions

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Gisselquist Technology recently posted a good blog article about metastability and common solutions. If you are trying to learn FPGAs, you’ll want to read it. If you know a lot about FPGAs already, you might still pick up some interesting tidbits in the post.

Don’t let the word metastability scare you. It is just a fancy way of saying that a flip flop can go crazy if the inputs are not stable for a certain amount of time before the clock edge and remain stable for a certain amount of time after the clock edge. These times are the setup …read more

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FPGA Design From Top to Bottom

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[Roland Lutz] gave a talk about FPGA design using the free tools for Lattice devices at the MetaRheinMainChaosDays conference this year. You can see the video below. It’s a great introduction to FPGAs that covers both the lowest-level detail and some higher level insight. If you’re getting started with these FPGAs, this video is a must-see.

[Roland] starts with the obligatory introductory material. He then jumps into an actual example before zooming back out to look at the internal details of the Lattice FPGA. For instance, this FPGA supports multiple bitstreams, so you can switch between different “programs” on the …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Programming FPGAs With Themselves

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It’s been a few years since the introduction of the first Open Source toolchain for FPGAs. You would think a free and Open way to program FPGAs would be a boon for hardware development, but so far we’re really not seeing much in the way of a small, cheap, clever device that brings FPGAs to the masses.

We don’t know if [Luke]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize is the killer project that will do it, but it is very neat. He’s designed a tiny FPGA development board using a Lattice iCE40 FPGA that’s able to program itself over USB. It’s …read more

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Homemade 6 GHz Radar, v3

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The third version of [Henrik Forstén] 6 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is online and looks pretty awesome. A FMCW radar is a type of radar that works by transmitting a chirp which frequency changes linearly with time. Simple continuous wave (CW) radar devices without frequency modulation cannot determine target range because they lack the timing mark necessary for accurately time the transmit and receive cycle in order to convert this information to range. Having a transmission signal modulated in frequency allows for the radar to have both a very high accuracy of range and also to measure simultaneously …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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Learn FPGA Programming from the 1940s

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We often think that not enough people are building things with FPGAs. We also love the retrotechtacular posts on old computer hardware. So it was hard to pass up [karlwoodward’s] post about the Chip Hack EDSAC Challenge — part of the 2017 Wuthering Bytes festival.

You might recognize EDSAC as what was arguably the first operational computer if you define a computer as what we think of today as a computer. [Maurice Wilkes] and his team invented a lot of things we take for granted today including subroutines (Wheeler jumps named after a graduate student).

The point to the EDSAC …read more

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The Linux FPGA

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It was never unusual to have a CPU and an FPGA together. After all, each has different strengths and weaknesses. However, newer devices like the Xilinx Zynq have both a CPU and an FPGA in the same package. That means your design has to span hardware, FPGA configurations, and software. [Mitchell Orsucci] was using a Zynq device on a ArtyZ7-20 board and decided he wanted to use Linux to operate the ARM processor and provide user-space tools to interface with the FPGA and reconfigure it dynamically.

This sounds like a big project and it certainly isn’t trivial by any means. …read more

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