Taking my hobby playing with embedded devices to the next level

I have been playing around with all sorts of embedded micro-controllers, ranging from the Atmel AVRs on the Arduino boards, to the powerful ARM Cortex processors running .NETMF and plenty of native code in-between. I recently decided I wanted to try my hand at FPGA, it looked totally foreign and it is not like anything else I had ever done.

All I can say is I am hooked, having the power to construct a processor or logic array to your liking just feels cool. I started off just over a week ago and I took it slow, implementing half-adders then full-adders until I eventually build a full ALU. My goal is to build a custom processor designed to run the Pascal PCode generated by the original UCSD-Pascal compilers.

So far I have not had much to show for it, everything toggles a few LEDs drives a few 7-Segment displays etc. Today I thought I would start playing with the clock management features, the thing with the clocks is without an oscilloscope you cannot really see if things are happening the way you expect. So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone. I will eventually need to generate video output and I need a custom clock to generate the right frequency to get the monitor to display the video data at the target resolution.

The Paplio board that I am using has a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA which is being clocked at 32MHz, I was able to synthesize a frequency of 64MHz, close enough to the 65MHz required to support VGA 1024x768 signal. This is not the limit, I am sure it can still go higher, I just have not tried it yet.

Here is a quick video of the system in action

Here is a link to the hardware that I am using

http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.Hardware