February 2016

Reverse engineering the LCD interface

So I was having trouble getting the LCD working initially, so I ended up probing a working HDMI to LCD converter board sold by adafruit. You see, this board was driving my LCD just fine, but my FPGA couldn’t do diddly. So I wanted to see what I was missing.

This proved more difficult because of these 40-pin FPC connectors. Not sure what the pitch is, but it’s really freakin’ close together.

With a lighted magnifier (3x diopter?), and sharp o’scope probe, I was able to isolate individual pins on the 40-pin, long enough to hit the stop button on the scope.

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Working on the User Flash Memory

So the Altera Max 10 FPGA we’re using has 256kbits of User Flash Memory. This is non-volatile memory that is built into the actual FPGA itself. This means you don’t need any external memory to get the FPGA to boot itself.

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The Chaos Engine

Published by Spectrum Holobyte, Inc.
Developed by The Bitmap Brothers
Released – 1993
Platforms – Acorn 32-bit, Amiga, Amiga CD32, Atari ST, BlackBerry, DOS,Genesis, J2ME, Linux, Macintosh, SNES, Windows

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Mirrorcopy

If you remember my last post I wrote about some viruses I got and took care of. But it got me thinking about doing something I have been putting off for years: backing up and organizing everything. When you have a couple of terrabytes of stuff counting to hundreds of thousands of individual files then you can guess what I’ve been doing these last two months.

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Launch of HOPE Badge Computer project

This is the first post of many in this category.

We have a project page giving the general goals of the project, but most of the hands-on action will happen here in the blog posts. For the latest status, reading these real-time blog posts will give you the best understanding.

We welcome feedback and commentary on the project.

 

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