He everyone! Today we got another great FPGA based project for you that we found over at hamsterworks.co.nz. Mike Field a.k.a Hamster wanted to use an undocumented display board from Deal Extreme with an FPGA board but as mentioned in the title there was absolutely no documentation available for this display except an Arduino Library written in C++ that he ported into a hardware implementation to realize his project!

The board used in this project is a TM1638 display that has 8 buttons, 8 red/green LEDs and 8 seven-segment displays, The project lights one of these 8 segments in each display, and turns all the LEDS on.

“This Deal Extreme display, the TM1638, features enough seven-segment displays, LEDs and buttons to build something really cool, and surprisingly isn’t terribly hard to interface with a microcontroller. The TM1638 library communicates with the outside world via only three pins and a simple serial connection.”

Mike wrote a hardware implementation for a Digilent Nexys2 board and a Digilent Basys2 board and the display is running nicely on these boards just like it does with an Arduino and it could be used to debug HDL code for these FPGAs.

We’ve got the original article here if you want to read the whole thing complete with tech specs and source code etc…

Feel free to discuss in the comments thread.

(Via HackaDay and hamsterworks)