We found an exciting and simple project yesterday on our forums that describes how to  turn your Papilio into an FM radio transmitter using nothing more than 60 lines of VHDL code and a piece of wire. The end result is an FPGA-based transmitter bleeping out “SOS” in Morse Code over FM radio.

Longtime Gadget Factory forum contributor Hamster spent some time getting the details together, writing the code for this project, and testing it out – here’s his wiki page on the project. Hamster says that the project took him only an hour to complete. “Here is a simple FM transmitter that is surprisingly good, and very, very simple. The spectral qualities of the RF output will be pretty awful – this is not supposed to be a production design for anything, it is just a hack!” It’s a pretty cool hack too, Hamster – thanks again for this and your many other contributions! We love seeing the cool stuff our readers come up with!

Here’s a link to Hamster’s original forum thread.

What would you program your Papilio FM transmitter to say in Morse Code?  Let us know in the comments.  I know I’d program mine to tell pirate jokes.