Now with everything built and wired up to the Arduino, I had one last step. I needed to get my PC to share its processor utilization data with the Arduino. I figured I would be writing up some software in C# to do this, but found an even simpler way....
While I do have a working system, I still am not done with the project - I'd like to ditch the Arduino and use a PIC or AVR to drive the motor. I'd also like to get the entire assembly mounted in a more gauge like enclosure. Something that would look...
Did a preliminary BOM today and selected a few key components, incl. the Spartan 6 variant I'd like to use and the SDRAM and Flash devices (may go with a BGA SP6 package with more IO...no risk yet to the design, regardless of what I choose). All...
Updated the schematic over the weekend to clean up the wiring and group signals, sheets, etc. more intelligently. A new version of the source files and a PDF can be found on the git repository. A direct link to download the PDF can be...
Uploaded video number 4 to Youtube, showing both SPI Multiplexing with a TI Bus Switch, and also implementing Asychronous SRAM (128K x 16). Next up, power supply!
Had some fun tonight playing around with PCB routing. You can see in the PDF in git or the PCB file (you'll need altium to open it) that I'm all about "pretty". :) Still a fair bit to finalize the routing and design and such but moving...
Uploaded the power supply design to git hub today. The supply is laid out in a way to allow either driving the system from the Arduino's 5V supply or using an external power adapter. The Arduino's 3V3 supply is tiny (very little current,...
I went ahead and added feedback from the fpga DONE pin via the addition of a status LED. Also added a jumper that enables that feedback to be sent back to the Arduino board. The jumper gives the option to route the DONE pin to the Arduino...
Made some updates to the design over the weekend to add LEDs, a nice dipswitch, make the silkscreen cleaner, clean up the pad arrays a bit and a lot more in the way of little cosmetic PCB tweaks. Overall some very important tweaks but in the grand...
Got enough parts to build 50 boards today. Updated stencils arrived, woo hoo! Retreating into soldering dungeon to spin up one or two to verify all's well with the world.
Recently I'd gotten a fair bit of interest from folks wanting to buy or or trade for one of these FPGA boards...And I must admit, I'm not terribly capitalistic when it comes to stuff I build outside of the work context (I often find I just end up giving...
The first pass of this board was built with the Due in mind (3V3) and other development boards that I had sitting around, almost all of which *other* than Arduino were 3.3V. In planning the evolution of this however, it quickly made...
Whew! Last round of mods were huge because as you come to find out quickly, anytime you add a level translator to a board - much less two & much less 10 channels each - you end up having to reroute most of the PCB layout. And as though that wasn't enough,...
Sooo.... I've been entertaining some new projects due to some recent test cases and I've determined it would be just as easy to update this beast of a project. Current update list:Change the LED type to the WS2812 that we love to use so...
Greetings hackers,As you might have notices, we pushed a few changes recently. The biggest one is that we have a brand new homepage. Instead of listing all the projects; we now show a combination of featured, newest, recently updated and skullmaster...