LED digital watch kit
ezContents 31 March 2017
If you can not afford a real NIXIE tube watch, there is an alternative. It is this 4-digit 7-segment LED watch kit. It costs less than 10 euros and you can find it on most Chinese reseller websites. It comes as a kit and you will need to do a bit of soldering and assembling.
LUT - Programmable logic gate
ezContents 12 February 2017
The basic building blocks of FPGA chips are logic elements (LEs). A logic element consists of LUTs (look-up tables), which are basically programmable logic gates. This gate is a multiplexer and can be build out of NAND gates. This small project is a breadboard implementation of this concept.
Altera Quartus on Mac OSX
ezContents 11 February 2017
One of the disadvantages of Altera Quartus II software is the disability to run natively on a Mac system. Luckily there are ways to get around this problem.
Electronics theory #1: Electricity
ezContents 3 February 2017
The first step in electronics is understanding the concepts of current and voltage. There is a hydraulic analogy that helps to understand electricity, but here we will try to cover how it works on atomic and electron level.
Programming ATmega328P Barebone
ezContents 1 January 2017
An undertaken electronic project does not always need a dedicated Arduino board. Sometimes it is sufficient to use separate Atmel ATmega328P chip and add some parts around it to make it work.
LM3915 VU Meter
ezContents 26 December 2016
Visualisation of sound gives an extra dimension in the experience of music. The LM3915 chip makes it possible to easily create a circuit that can accomplish this task.
Amiga floppy disk drive emulator
ezContents 8 December 2016
Gotek floppy disk emulator can not be used on an Amiga computer without modding it. Luckily it is not hard to change the firmware on the device to be able to boot ADF images from an USB drive.
Commodore 64 PLA chip replacement
ezContents 17 November 2016
The most important chip in commodore 64 computer is the PLA chip. When this chip is broken, nothing will work and most certainly you will get a black screen after you try to turn it on.
Blinking LED with Altera EPM3064 CPLD
ezContents 13 November 2016
FPGA's and CPLD's are certainly very cool devices. It is possible to create you own logical circuits and emulate real hardware chips on the lowest level. For this test project we will use Alera CPLD which is also known as MAX3000A and it's full code is ALTERA EPM3064ATC44-10.