Hdl

Introduction As you may know, I’m working on this blog also as a way to log my learning journey. So, to make up for the lack of interesting peripherals on the Arty A7, I bought a set of modules for Arduino. Most of them were quite uninteresting, but I got this I2S DAC module from Adafruit that implements the UDA1334A from NXP (datasheet). This device interests me the most among the ones I got in the assortment, because ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted to make my own guitar effects (in fact, I believe many electronic engineers are born this way, or something similar), so the end goal is quite ambitious as you can see. But let’s start with something easy. ...

Introduction So, after you’re done with the book and have implemented your first 8-bit CPU, you keep wondering ok, but now I want to do real-world stuff I’ve got you covered — when it comes to real-world stuff, nothing beats having the capability to send data to and from other devices. When I began my personal projects, right after getting my Arty A7, I thought I’d need to debug what’s happening inside the FPGA in case the internal logic analyzer wasn’t reliable (pro tip: it’s very reliable). So being able to send data to a computer using a simple protocol is a must. ...

Introduction If you’re a hardware engineer you need no explanation — this is more for the programmers who try to build things with an FPGA, believing it’s the next step up from Arduino. (I happen to agree, so no judgment here.) As someone who wrote a lot of code in my youth (and still loves fiddling with the Linux kernel), I’m lucky that I understood the purpose of HDL early on. ...