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Declaring VGATonic v1 Finished.

A project log for VGAtonic

CPLD-flavored VGA Video card

pkPK 06/14/2015 at 23:260 Comments

I felt bad about leaving you folks in a weird quasi-finished 98.4% done state. My motivation recently came back so I finally finished a framebuffer implementation for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. That's right - "startx" in all of its glory on this part we dreamed up a year ago.

(If that doesn't bring a tear to your eye, maybe that 1994-era color depth will!)

So, if you remember, the big doubt when starting the project was whether we could even fit all our logic on a CPLD. We did it - and we have like 30 macrocells to spare(!) on this 144 macrocell part.

Okay, fine, maybe I just wanted the challenge of the small part, but even though I had the project working well as a "Digital Picture Frame" 10 months ago... I had to see what we could do attached to real equipment.

I heard you guys like VGA, so here's VGATonic opening the VGA project VGATonic's project log page and running on a VGA monitor. At 25 frames per second:

So, hurry over to GitHub and build yourself a copy: https://github.com/dqydj/VGAtonic

And what now? The motivation continues! Parsing the Hackaday Prize 2015 Rules, I see we can build on what we've got since we didn't make the Semifinals cut! Here are the caveats:

1. A new project page must be created

2. The project must show meaningful development during the course of the Contest.

So, let's move this party to the new page: VGATonic v2.0 promises to be a great time. I'll upload a video there soon so you can see it.

This time I'll try to add all the features this year, okay? No waiting until 2016.

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