FPGAs, CPLDs, PALs, as well as GALs, Oh My! This week’s Hacklet focuses on a few of the very best Programmable Logic jobs on Hackaday.io! Programmable logic gadgets tend to have a steep discovering curve. Not only is a new hacker discovering complex parts, however there are entire new languages to discover – like VHDL or Verilog. Taking the plunge as well as jumping in to programmable logic is well worth it though. High-speed jobs which would be impossible with microcontrollers are all of a sudden within reach!
A fantastic example of this is [Tom McLeod’s] Cheap FPGA-based HDMI Experimenting Board. [Tom’s] goal was to produce a board which might output 720p video through HDMI at a sensible frame rate. He’s utilizing a Xilinx Spartan 6 chip to do it, together with a handful of support components. The pictures will be kept on an SD card. [Tom] is wishing to do some video with the configuration as well, however he has yet to see if the chip will be quick sufficient to deal with video decoding while generating the HDMI data stream. [Tom] has been peaceful on this project for a few months – so we’re hoping that either he will see this publish as well as send an update, or that somebody will pick up his source data as well as continue the project!
Next up is our own [technolomaniac] with his Arduino-Compatible FPGA Shield. starting out with FPGAs can be difficult. [Technolomaniac] has made it a bit simpler with this shield. originally started as a job on .io as well as now offered in The Hackaday Store, the shield features a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA. [Technolomaniac] made power as well as interfacing simple by including regulators as well as level shifters to keep the sensitive FPGA happy. Not sure where to start? inspect out [Mike Szczys’] Spartan-6 FPGA hi World! [Mike] takes us from installing Xilinx’s totally free tool chain to getting a “hello world” led blinker running!
Still thinking about discovering about Programmable Logic, however not sure where to go? inspect out [Bruce Land’s] Teaching FPGA parallel computing. Actually, inspect out whatever [Bruce] has done on Hackaday.io – the guy is a living legend, as well as a riches of info on electronics as well as embedded systems. Being a professor of engineering at new York’s Cornell university doesn’t hurt either! In Teaching FPGA parallel computing, [Bruce] links to Cornell’s ECE 5760 class, which he instructs. The class utilizes an Altera/Terasic DE2 FPGA board to demonstrate parallel computing utilizing programmable logic devices. note that [Bruce] teaches this class utilizing Verilog, so all you seasoned VHDL folks still can discover something new!
Finally, we have [Michael A. Morris] with Chameleon. Chameleon is an Arduino compatible FPGA board with a Xilinx Spartan 3A FPGA on-board. [Michael] designed Chameleon for two major purposes: soft-core processors, as well as intelligent serial communications interface. On the processor side Chameleon truly shines. [Michael] has implemented a 6502 core in his design. This implies that it would be best at house as the core of a retrocomputing project. [Michael] is still difficult at work on Chameleon, he’s just recently gotten fig-FORTH 1.0 running! good work [Michael]!
Want much more programmable logic goodness? inspect out our Programmable Logic List!
That about wraps things up for this episode of The Hacklet! As always, see you next week. exact same hack time, exact same hack channel, bringing you the very best of Hackaday.io!