HDMI Gameduino; MiniSpartan6+ swap; power catastrophe

HDMI Gameduino

Last week's sketch a HDMI-output Gameduino got a lot of encouraging responses (thanks all!) so I've started to think about prototypes. First I wanted to actually get HDMI working on a Spartan 6 FPGA, to make sure it's all possible. So I brought out my trusty Papilio Duo, and I connected it to a very tiny HDMI breakout. Amazon next-day is really good for rapid prototyping!

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My plan for was to get HDMI at 640x480 running first, following this tutorial. I got as far as getting the Verilog loaded, but then disaster struck. More on that below.

miniSpartan6+ swap

The miniSpartan6 was a successful Kickstarter a few years ago, and has an interesting set of peripherals. Sadly it looks as if it's no longer available anywhere, even ebay shows none available.
If you're in the US and have a miniSpartan6+ (pictured here) and it's something you could bear to part with, I can give you a big box of Excamera Labs goodies in exchange. That's I²CDriver, SPIDriver, Electric Dollar Store and Gameduino 3X. Let me know if you'd like to trade.

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Power catastrophe


I live in California, in a small town, where the electrical supply is quite unreliable. But in 20 years the power has never been off for more than 10 hours. On Saturday the local power company cut the power to the town, and like 2 million other Californians, we found ourselves without electricity. It stayed off here for 45 hours, returning at 5pm yesterday evening. Luckily I have a small 60W solar panel, so we could continue to be online and have light in the evenings.

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It's enough to run a laptop for a few hours a day, but not enough to run my desktop PC or any other equipment. I spent a lot of Sunday researching solar power upgrades. Eventually I settled on a new 160 W panel, and a couple of other things that I'll talk about in a future update. My goal is to have all the main office systems running off solar. Like a lot of Californians today, I intend to reduce my dependence on PG&E.

Thanks for reading. James.

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