Posted July 28, 2014 by Chris

"Last week my little friend (7 years old) bought a new RC car and challenged me for a race. So I bought new sets of batteries and cleaned my dusty RC car. Only to find out that it doesn’t work anymore. The forward and reverse movement are still good but the steering part was the problem. What a shame – I lost by default :). So I decided to hacked it and make it Arduino controlled."

Posted July 27, 2014 by Chris

"…The car in front of me drove with his emergency flashers on, and at times all I could see were his lights. At that moment the crazy idea popped in my head – I wonder if I could use a PC monitor and phototransistors to send data to a microchip? I can’t think of any immediate uses for this capability, but perhaps if I make a working prototype I’ll stumble upon some."

Posted July 26, 2014 by Chris

"This project is aimed at synthesizing the ZX-Badaloc, a ZX-Spectrum Clone developed in Italy, into a Xilinx SPARTAN-3E Fpga. The original project’s main CPLD, I/O and Keyboard cplds, Z80 Processor, IDT dualport video ram can be squeezed into a single chip.
This solves the main problem: WIRINGS."

Posted July 24, 2014 by Chris

This week we’re moving on to Lesson 5: Procedural Logic, a topic that moves simple combinatorial logic to add clocking! This lesson is part of our new PyroEDU course: An Introduction to CPLD and FPGA. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"FPGA and CPLD devices offer a separate type of logic which happens in series. This is called procedural logic and it uses a clock source to drive the logic contained within the procedure."

Posted July 23, 2014 by Chris

"One day when playing with the CPLD board I accidentally shorted out two pins on the on-board FT2232 and – unfortunately – the magic smoke escaped! It was very clear that the FT2232 failed because it got very warm when plugging in the USB cable. Luckily the dev kit includes a 0.1″ header landing to connect an external JTAG probe. Wanting to get a Dangerous Prototypes Bus Blaster JTAG programmer anyway, this was the perfect excuse."

Posted July 19, 2014 by Chris

"I spent my evenings over Memorial Day weekend working on a customized fixture designed to make programming and testing the electronics of our Question Block Lamp really easy. As part of our plan to bring the lamps back into production, we decided that a custom programming fixture would go a long way towards helping our outsourcing partner get exactly what we want quickly and without the difficulty of communication."

Posted July 18, 2014 by Chris

"RFID is known as Radio Frequency IDentification. The technology is able to wireless-ly picking up information from a RFID tag which can be embedded onto most object. Fast and reliable. RFID has helped to rise up our productivity."

Posted July 17, 2014 by Chris

The topic for this week’s lesson in FPGA and CPLD land is: Lesson 4: Combinatorial Logic. This lesson is part of our new PyroEDU course: An Introduction to CPLD and FPGA. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"In the Introduction to Digital Electronics course, we explored AND, OR, NOT, NOR and other logic gates. Now we’ll harness the power of programmed logic to dynamically create and use these gates in a CPLD."

Posted July 14, 2014 by Chris

"The device records audio captured by a microphone at a sample rate of 8000Hz, it is stored into 8bit volatile SRAM, and then replayed out of a speaker, it is controlled via CMOS 4000 logic.
It takes up 4 full breadboards, and requires -5, 0, 5 and 12v supplies. All chips are DIL."

Posted July 13, 2014 by Chris

"This is beyond OBDII readers, but not exactly iOS and Android apps like Torque. This segment is defined as being a permanent or semi-permanent installation. I reserve the right to keep this definition a “moving target” so as to keep it differentiated from smartphone and tablet apps ;-)."