scanlime048 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 4

In the fourth and final part of our HUB75-style display driver series, we make a cool demo in gateware using the modular driver! In this segment we’ll add a frame buffer and implement a video feedback plus munching squares effect in Verilog and Icestudio.

scanlime048 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 4

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is available on Github.

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, where recurring donations make this content possible.

For an alternative to youtube and twitch, check out Diode Zone.

If you’d like some of those cool scanlime stickers or Servo AF stream gear, check out the shop.

For previous episodes, check out the full scanlime playlist.

Each episode is compiled together from many livestreams which you can hang out with on the companion scanlime-in-progress channel.

Follow @scanlimelive for live streaming announcements.

scanlime047 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 3

In the third part of our HUB75-style display driver in Verilog and Icestudio, we start looking at demoscene-style effects to implement next, and implement a gamma correction and dithering module to improve color quality.

scanlime047 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 3

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is available on Github.

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, where recurring donations make this content possible.

For an alternative to youtube and twitch, check out Diode Zone.

If you’d like some of those cool scanlime stickers or Servo AF stream gear, check out the shop.

For previous episodes, check out the full scanlime playlist.

Each episode is compiled together from many livestreams which you can hang out with on the companion scanlime-in-progress channel.

Follow @scanlimelive for live streaming announcements.

scanlime046 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 2

In this second part of the HUB75-style display driver in Verilog and Icestudio, we’ll debug and reorganize the existing gateware into something modular that we can build upon, with nice and stable Binary Code Modulation for brightness control.

scanlime046 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 2

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is available on Github.

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, where recurring donations make this content possible.

For an alternative to youtube and twitch, check out Diode Zone.

If you’d like some of those cool scanlime stickers or Servo AF stream gear, check out the shop.

For previous episodes, check out the full scanlime playlist.

Each episode is compiled together from many livestreams which you can hang out with on the companion scanlime-in-progress channel.

Follow @scanlimelive for live streaming announcements.

scanlime045 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 1

In this project we’ll be programming up some FPGA “gateware” using the visual Icestudio environment and the industry standard Verilog language, in order to display full color images on an inexpensive HUB75E-style LED video wall panel.

This first video focuses on project bringup and just getting *something* on the screen, even if it’s a bit buggy!

scanlime045 – Icestudio LED Matrix Driver Part 1

The Icestudio editor and the entire build toolchain are free and open source software!

The FPGA board and adapter PMOD are part of the iCEBreaker CrowdSupply campaign, which was successfully funded! This is a great little FPGA dev board, and a platform designed to help more people get started with FPGAs using open source tools.

This project is available on Github.

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, where recurring donations make this content possible.

For an alternative to youtube and twitch, check out Diode Zone.

If you’d like some of those cool scanlime stickers or Servo AF stream gear, check out the shop.

For previous episodes, check out the full scanlime playlist.

Each episode is compiled together from many livestreams which you can hang out with on the companion scanlime-in-progress channel.

Follow @scanlimelive for live streaming announcements.

Fun with FPGAs: SPI EEPROM emulator

I found a fun excuse to practice my digital logic design over the past few days:

Loading the SRAM

This is an FPGA emulating the SPI EEPROM (save game memory) in a modified Nintendo DS game cartridge. The emulated EEPROM is backed by 1 MB of SRAM, and there is a USB interface that you can use to simultaneously read or write the SRAM from a PC.

You can use it to really quickly modify or inspect the contents of a game’s save memory- for example, for developing save game exploits or reverse engineering save file formats. You can also use the large memory space as a fast shared memory buffer, for sending debugging information or memory dumps back to the PC, or for loading larger blocks of code from the PC.

The FPGA design is written in Verilog, and I’m running it on the popular Digilent Spartan 3 board. The upload/download tool that runs on the PC is written in Python, plus it can be used as a Python module for writing more complex tools that interact with the DS through this shared memory buffer. Source code is in Subversion, and released under an MIT-style license.