Weird Things To Do With FPGAs

There’s an old joke about how can you find the height of a building using a barometer. One of the punchlines is to drop the barometer from the roof and time how long it takes to hit the groun…

Do We Need A New Hardware Description Language?

When you think about hardware description languages, you probably think of Verilog or VHDL. There are others, of course, but those are the two elephants in the room. Do we need another one? [Veryl-…

Reverse Engineering The Behringer Ultranet Protocol

Ultranet is a protocol created by audio manufacturer Behringer to transmit up to 16 channels of 24-bit sound over a Cat-5 cable. It’s not an open standard, though: Behringer doesn’t offer an API or…

Bit-Serial CPU: Ultra-Tiny VHDL-Based CPU With Forth Interpreter

Soft cores for FPGAs come in many different flavors, covering a wide range of applications. The Bit-Serial CPU (bcpu) soft core presented by [Richard James Howe] is interesting for taking up just a…

Compute The Mandelbrot Set With A Custom RISC-V CPU

When faced with an FPGA, some people might use it to visualize the Mandelbrot set. Others might use it to make CPUs. But what happens if you combine the two? [Michael Kohn] shows us what happens wi…

Building A GPS Receiver From The Ground Up

One of the more interesting facets of GPS is that, at least from the receiver’s point-of-view, it’s a fairly passive system. All of the information beamed down from the satellites is ou…

Will We Recycle FPGAs In The Future?

If you really want to look at how much something costs, you need to look at total cost of ownership, not just the sticker price. Same goes for things like pollution and carbon footprint. A vehicle,…

BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire

A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the BeagleV-Fire has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built aro…

Using EPROMS And EEPROMs As Programmable Logic With Lisp

That EPROMs, EEPROMs and kin can be used as programmable logic should probably not come as a major surprise, but [Jimmy] has created a Lisp-based project that makes using these chips as a logic arr…

FPGA Runs IBM 5151 MDA Display

When it comes to driving a display, you can do all kinds of fancy tricks with microcontrollers to get an image up. Really, though, FPGAs are the weapon of choice for playing with these kinds of sig…

A Cycle-Accurate Sega Genesis With FPGA

The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a powerful tool that is becoming more common across all kinds of different projects. They are effectively programmable hardware devices, capable of creat…

The Another World Chip

We cover many recreations of classic computer games on these pages, sometimes on original hardware, other times through ports to newer hardware, or even on emulators. But [Sylefeb]’s version …

3D Audio Imaging With A Phased Array Microphone

Remember the scene from Blade Runner, where Deckard puts a photograph into a Photo Inspector? The virtual camera can pan and move around the captured scene, pulling out impossible details. It seems…

FPGA Plays Tic-Tac-Toe

As computers get more and more powerful and artificial intelligence algorithms improve, few games remain where the best humans can reliably beat their electronic counterparts. In chess this barrier…

FPGA Breakout Board For DIP Package Shenanigans

FPGAs are supremely flexible and powerful devices. However, they usually come in QFP or BGA packages that are altogether difficult for hobbyists to play with. The DIP-FPGA breakout board aims to so…

Creating Lithography-Free Photonic Reprogrammable Circuits

The field of photonics has seen significant advances during the past decades, to the point where it is now an integral part of high-speed, international communications. For general processing photo…

Iran’s Military Quantum Claim: It’s Only 99.4% Ridiculous

When Iran recently announced a quantum processing algorithm (Google translation) that would help its military to detect water surface disturbances, the instant response from Western media was one o…

Commodore 64 Upgrade In Modern Package

While the Commodore 64 was an immensely popular computer for its time, and still remains a strong favorite within the retrocomputing community, there’s a reason we’re not using modern C…

Bringing The PIO To The FPGA

We’ve seen some pretty incredible hacks using the Raspberry Pi 2040. However, one of the most exciting bits of hardware onboard is the Programmable I/O (PIO). Not content with it just being a…