Over the past few days I’ve been working on a fun FPGA project: getting a sprite (my little ship) to move around the screen on a Nexys A7 board, complete with a starfield background, rotation, and even thruster sounds when…
Over the last few weeks I’ve been implementing a minimalist 8-bit SAP-1 (Simple As Possible) computer on an FPGA. This post captures the architecture, the SystemVerilog snippets that make it tick, the VGA output I just added, and the little…
Programming music directly into an FPGA can feel like a grind—especially if you’re hand-coding note tables and timing values. When working with the Digilent Nexys A7 (100 MHz), I wanted a more direct way to take melodies I’d written and…
Introduction In this tutorial, we’ll build a real-time color monitoring system: Hardware: APDS-9960 color sensor connected to a CircuitPython-capable board. CircuitPython: Script to connect to Wi-Fi, read RGB values, and publish JSON payloads to the sensors/color MQTT topic. macOS SwiftUI…
Turning a MIDI File into Arduino Music with PlatformIO 🎵 Project Overview In this project, we created a simple workflow to convert a standard .mid MIDI file into binary note data suitable for playback on an Arduino Mega 2560 using…
I’ve spent the past few days exploring a project that allows me to display text on an LCD using a Raspberry Pi. We will be using Python in this post, so familiarity with Python will be useful. First, make sure…
In a previous post, I covered the steps of how to connect an LCD display to the Raspberry Pi. This post will demonstrate how to use it in a Node-Red flow. Install Node-Red You can follow these directions to install…
Creating a physical music product in the digital age can be a rewarding way to connect with listeners. Here’s how I built a series of custom USB thumb drives containing my music, a self-contained HTML player, and visual artwork—perfect for…
Welcome to this step-by-step walkthrough of how we created a beautiful, responsive USB music playlist viewer using only web technologies. We’ll highlight each transformation stage and show the exact prompts that guided us to the final product. 🎬 Intro We…
My retro computer is an SC126 designed by Stephen C. Cousins. It has two serial ports. I am using 1 serial port to interface with my retro amber monitor. That leaves the second one open to use as a way…