The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering presents this tutorial on the VHDL programming language. VHDL is one of the primary languages used to program CPLDs and FPGAs.
Once you get your program written, you can load in onto a device with your own Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Development on the Logic Sniffer client is blazing forward. Jawi, and a few new contributors, are adding features daily.
The development team is looking for a few dedicated beta testers on various platforms. The squad will test whether a pending release is functioning properly on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, before it goes live.
If you’d like to help test new clients, please let us know in the forum.
Don’t forget to share your current project in the comments or the forum. This week our favorite project gets a free SOIC protoboard.
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:
This week is about getting new stuff going, and getting stuff back in stock:
What are you hacking this week?
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week we’re giving away two PCBs for our new xQFP breakout board. Prototype with QFP size surface mount chips. Currently available in 0.50mm, 0.65mm, and 0.80mm. If you’d like a PCB just ask for one in the comments – and please specify the size.
Available in 0.50mm, 0.65mm, and 0.80mm for $3, read about the design on the wiki.
XESS introduces their new XuLA-200 breakout board. The XuLA Board packs a 200,000-gate FPGA and a supervisory microcontroller into a 2″ x 1″ footprint (51 mm x 25 mm). XESS is committed to a completely open source design for this board which features a Xilinx XC3S200A Spartan 3A FPGA with 8 MByte SDRAM, 2 Mbit Flash, 3.3 & 1.2V regulators, a 12 MHz oscillator and 40-pin interface. Alongside the FPGA is a PIC 18F14K50 micro, USB 2.0 port and auxiliary JTAG port.
The board works with the XSTOOLs software, XILINX ISE and WebPACK, iMPACT and ChipScope (requires Xilinx JTAG cable).
Check out the XuLA-200 Manual.
For his USC Rocket Propulsion Lab, Chris Fenton designed this project using a Picaxe 18X microcontroller which accepts a GPS NMEA data stream, pulls out the altitude and logs it to a 24LC512 external EEPROM. Upon recovery the data is then read from the EEPROM. Source code for the Picaxe and hand drawn schematic for this hasty project are provided.
An analysis of the circuit and chip datasheet reveals that the 3 pin female header on the schematic is for serial IO, and that the GPS can interface via DB9 connector with a rocket mounted transmitter to send real-time GPS data in addition to EEPROM logging. NOTE: It appears that fifth line of code which reads, “if input0=0 then readback” should read “if input1=1 then readback”. This is the input which triggers the data readout from the EEPROM.
Via PyroElectro.
robots shares his design for a reflow oven controller:
I have bought [an] oven. The main reason for this was to bake some PCBs. As with every reflow oven, this one needs temperature control as well.
I have baked several pcb without problem with unmodified oven. But that might be luck, as the temperature profile is nowhere near perfect.
I have therefore decided to make some simple temp controller to take care of the whole soldering process. As my oven features fan, I will probably want to control it as well. The contoller should not to need any special programmer (mega can by programmed with BP) and the board should be etch-able at home.
Via the project log forum.
Now here’s something to do with outdated floppy disk drives. Connect them to a MIDI controller and grind out some tunes from your own floppy disk opera.
Via the forum.
LCD displays of the 2×16 variety are a good way of getting feedback from your Arduino project. If you want a more enhanced visual experience, a thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD is the superior way to go. This tutorial by Tronixstuff describes a way use the the 4D Systems 1.44″ TFT serial interface LCD with Arduino. Instructions are provided on changing the display’s resident firmware (if necessary, depending the version of TFT), and how to communicate text and graphics from the Arduino using either serial communications or the displayshield4d library.
This segment is the latest in a series of Arduino tutorials posted by Tronixstuff.
Semtech has released a line of “power and go” inexpensive data transmitter chips. The new SX1240 and SX1242 ISM-band RF transmitters enable true data-in/RF-out capability, with only an external crystal and antenna impedance matching network needed. They simplify design by integrating “power-and-go modes,” which are pre-set for 434 MHz and 868 MHz (SX1240) or 345 MHz (SX1242). These devices can be paired with Semtech’s low-power SX1239 RF receiver for a complete radio solution. Expected uses include keyless entry, active RFID and wireless monitoring applications.
Pricing for the SX1240 is anticipated in the sub-$1.00 range for the SOIC8-EP package. Check out the datasheet.
Markus demonstrates his OLED display sine-scroller:
The OLED board sold by SeeedStudio used I2C to communicate with the MCU. I found that updating the screen this way takes too long to get a descent refresh rate, so I modified the board to be able to access the driver chip using its SPI interface.
Updating the whole screen (128 x 64 pixel = 1024 Byte) takes now only about 1 ms, giving enough time to do some other fun stuff between updates :)
Thanks Markus! Via the comments.
Markus Gritsch ported TinySID, a retro music file player, to the Web Platform.
After successfully getting the TinySID library running on a PIC32 some time ago, I recently wondered, if the 16 bit MCUs from Microchip would also be fast enough to run the code. It turned out, that they are, at least the 40 MIPS models (PIC24H and dsPIC33F).
A big hurdle is the (compared to the PIC32MX) small RAM on these chips. Since the SID tune must be loaded into RAM, only some small tunes will fit into the 8 kB of the MCU used on the Web Platform I had at hand.
However, the source code and binary are available from Google Code and a demonstration video is on YouTube. The PWM output is on IO7, and IO8 is used to switch the tune when pulled to GND.
In case you missed it in the midweek forum roundup, we’ve got the video below the break. Via the forum.
Get an assembled Web platformV1.1 from Seeedstudio for $40.
Continue reading “Muscial web platform: TinySID on a 16bit PIC”
Fabio Varesano has designed what is probably the smallest Arduino compatible board. He states:
By using the QFN32 version of the ATMEGA 328p, 0.05″ connectors, 0402 components and removing everything not strictly necessary, I’ve been able to design and hand build an Arduino compatible board which is very small (20.7×15.2 mm) and ultra light (2g) but has exactly the same computing power of the Arduino Duemilanove or UNO.
Femtoduino is a true open source project, with schematic and Gerber files provided and released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. It was been designed using Kicad, a libre PCB design software.
Via Arduino blog.
Students Ling-Wei Lee and Kevin Tang at Cornell University developed a version of the rock paper scissors game using an Atmega644, CMOS camera module and a 2×16 LCD. Their project requires the human player to wear a glove that has black tape on each finger. Upon a signal from the LCD, the player plays their hand, the camera captures the image, and based on the quantity of black pixels present, processes and decides whether the player has played a rock, paper, or scissors. The system also generates a random hand, and determines whether the player has won or not, and outputs this onto an LCD screen.
The IBM Jeopardy challenge is over and a new champion has been crowned! Watson, the size of 12 refrigerators, three day total was $77,174. While Ken Jennings, known for winning 74 consecutive games, finished with a total of $24,000. And Brad Rutter, known for winning over $3,000,000 on the show, finished with $21,600.
With the prizes totaling $1.5M, and $1.25M of that going to charity this is more than the beginning of the machine apocalypse.
All jokes aside this represents a large leap forward in machine learning, language understanding, and a step forward in artificial intelligence. IBM plans to use the technology to help doctors make better and faster treatment decisions.
Here’s a half-hour video produced by Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in 1967 describing the integrated circuit (IC), its design and development process, and giving examples of late 1960s uses of IC technology. Serves to provide some perspective on how the industry started, and how far we’ve come.
rsdio sends an app note: Locked-sync sine generator
This circuit synchronizes a sinewave output through three decades of frequency (20Hz to 20kHz) while maintaining low THD and constant amplitude.
Thanks for the tip!
Bård S D built a guitar with a 3D printer. but not any guitar, built to his own specifications he wanted to it to be minimalist and functional. many of the parts double like the pick holder and hand rest. There is a video after the break.
via Hack a Day
It’s easier to program CPLDs and FPGAs from the Bus Pirate with a new firmware and PC application.
The Bus Pirate has done JTAG with OpenOCD for a long time. OpenOCD is usually overkill for a simple CPLD or FPGA project though, and many find it difficult to get started.
Clear back in Bus Pirate firmware v0c there was a simple JTAG programmer called an XSVF player (PDF). XSVF is a set of instructions that tell a programmer how to wiggle pins in such a manner as to enter the firmware into a JTAG device. The v0c programmer wasn’t very user friendly, and involved dumping a binary file into the terminal.
The XSVF player is back as a new bonus firmware. We also whipped up a PC utility for loading XSVF files directly from the command prompt.
We programed an XC9572XL and XC2C64A using XSVF programming files exported from the Xilinx Impact utility. It isn’t limited to Xilinix chips though. There are utilities that convert normal SVF files from any chip vendor into compressed XSVF files. If you test it please let us know if it worked.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Toley posted pictures of a his Bus Pirate case made from a Hammond 1551HBK box.
My Bus Pirate is the one from Sparkfun and it fits perfectly inside the Hammond 1551HBK box that can be buy from Digi-key for around $2.
Here’s some other user-submitted cases.
Thanks for the tip! Via the forum.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
