This is an absolutely incredible adventure story about designing – and failing, and designing again – a homemade graphics card for the Amiga 2000, from Lukas F. Hartmann:
I decided in October 2015 in a feat of madness: “I’ll just make my own graphics card. How hard can it be?”
It turned out to be a very, very challenging project, but luckily I got much further than expected. On the way, I had to learn how to design a PCB and get it manufactured, how to work with SMD parts, how to program in Verilog and synthesize code for an FPGA, how SDRAM and DVI/HDMI work (or how to get them to do at least something). I also had to find out how to write a driver for the sadly closed/undocumented Picasso96 “retargetable” graphics stack for AmigaOS 3.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
