Electronics - The Cerebral Kitchen

My first arcade cabinet project - day two

by Michael Earls

I did some more troubleshooting today and I have to admit that I'm a little embarrassed. I took the power supply and harness out of the cabinet so I could work on it

Classic Arcade Games

My first arcade cabinet project - day one

by Michael Earls

I woke up early Saturday morning so I could get started before it got too hot (it still smells bad from having the dead rat in it, so we're keeping it in the carport to air out). I plugged in the cab and the speakers made a crackling sound for a few seconds and then went silent.

Classic Arcade Games

Pac-Man Fever - My newest electronics project - Part 1 - Maggie and the dead rat

by Michael Earls

Every story has a beginning. The story of how I acquired my first arcade cabinet is no exception. It started when I was contacted by an old high school friend on Facebook. She

Electronics

Building a Magic: the Gathering Life Counter with Arduino and MAX7219

by Michael Earls

Before dedicating myself to the task of soldering 64 LEDs to make my 4x4x4 LED cube, I decided to build a life counter for the card game Magic: the Gathering. Basically, it is

Electronics

4x4x4 LED Cube - Part 2 - Schematic

by Michael Earls

I sat down and built the schematic for my 4x4x4 LED cube tonight. I only built out 2 layers. The other 2 layers are identical to the first two. They are stacked on

Electronics

4x4x4 LED Cube - Part 1 - Design

by Michael Earls

This post is the first in a series on making a 4x4x4 LED cube utilizing a Max7219 as a multiplexer.

Pathfinder

Being bored has never felt so good

by Michael Earls

Ater two 55+ hour work weeks and a 17 hour day (we didn't leave the office until 1 AM and I worked through lunch that day), I've been a bit lazy. In fact,

Electronics

I have officially turned to the dark side

by Michael Earls

Slowly turning to the dark side, I just purchased my first Apple watch.

3D Printing

3D Printer Z-Axis Woes

by Michael Earls

In a previous post, I discussed my new 3D printer and I briefly mentioned that I'm having z-axis banding issues. I'm not quite sure what's happening, but I initially had severe z-axis banding

3D Printing

My first 3D printer - the Geeetech i3 Pro B (Prusa Clone)

by Michael Earls

Back in the day... When I was a kid (back in the 80's), I used to come home from school and watch a great TV show about future technologies. I don't remember the

FPGA

FPGA for Fun #1 (Part 2) - Driving the MAX 7219 LED Display Module

by Michael Earls

In a previous post, I covered the wiring diagrams, finite state machines, and LED segment encoding for the MAX7219 display module wired up to the Mojo FPGA. In this post, I will cover

FPGA

FPGA for Fun #1 (Part 1) - Driving the MAX 7219 LED Display Module

by Michael Earls

I recently ordered a few LED display modules based on the MAX7219 chip. When they arrived, I immediately began putting together projects to use them. The first project was to wire one up

Programming

Driving the Max 7219 7-Segment Display Module from ASP.NET Core on the Raspberry Pi

by Michael Earls

In a previous blog post, I discussed how to create a dotnet core 2.0 WebApi application to run on the Raspberry Pi and trigger an LED. This post will build upon that

Programming

Is the feedback loop the key to a learning computer?

by Michael Earls

When I was in my early 20's, I setup my Korg Poly-Six synthesizer so that the audio output fed into a Radio Shack (Realistic) Reverb Machine with the output of that going back

Electronics

The Hand-MIDI Interface Project - Adafruit Feather 32u4 with Magnetometer

by Michael Earls

A few months ago, I had an idea to create a new musical instrument that mounted on a glove. I used a cycling glove that I had from that time that I bought

FPGA

Armchair Engineering - Ignorance is bliss

by Michael Earls

I'm totally into my FPGA. Embedded Micro is supposed to be announcing a new FPGA based on the new Artix 7 FPGA chip that will allow me to run the new Vivado design

Synthesizers

Emulating a Lunetta circuit with an FPGA is a flawed idea

by Michael Earls

Last night, I decided to explore an idea that I have been formulating over the past several months, but haven't actually taken the time to explore. I had a thought that I could

Electronics

Strange VGA Effects on an FPGA

by Michael Earls

When I assembled my VGA implementation on my Mojo FPGA, I did so with only a single wire for each of the color signals (Red, Green, and Blue). This limited my color choices

FPGA

A Saturday morning puzzle on my FPGA

by Michael Earls

I woke up this morning with a desire to solve a puzzle. I decided that I'd make a simple LED chaser on a 7-segment LED display using my Mojo FPGA (now that I

FPGA

Pong on the Mojo Revisited

by Michael Earls

In my previous post, I briefly discussed the implementation of a pseudo-pong game on my Mojo FPGA developer board. I was able to implement the VHDL version that I linked to later in

FPGA

Creating PONG on the Mojo FPGA

by Michael Earls

I recently found an old VGA monitor on the side of the road and it inspired me to see if I could get my Mojo FPGA board to output a VGA signal. I

Electronics

Custom Fritzing part for Mojo v3

by Michael Earls

There is a great tool called Fritzing that allows you to create a breadboard view of circuits that you can use for documentation. I really wanted to use it to document the breadboard

Mathematics

Solving the Stable Marriage problem on an FPGA (Part 2)

by Michael Earls

In part 1, I introduced the Stable Marriage problem and proposed implementing it on an FPGA. In this post, I will define the approach I am taking to define the preferences in binary

FPGA

Using Notepad++ as the default editor for Xilinx ISE

by Michael Earls

I was having difficulties working with the built in text editor for the ISE FPGA tool from Xilinx. I was missing some of the things I've come to depend on in the editors

FPGA

Reversible Binary Counter on the Mojo FPGA

by Michael Earls

After playing around with the Binary counter implementation from a previous post: Implementing a simple binary counter in the Mojo FPGA IDE, I wanted to make the LEDs display a count down in

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