Hello. By the way, does anybody here have enough sense of humor to build esoteric hardware using FPGA? Esoteric hardware can be extension of esoteric programming languages:
I don't know what you mean, maybe some useless hardware projects for fun? What about building a Theremin:
I think with a FPGA it should be possible to produce much more interesting effects.
Or plug-in a MIDI keyboard and implement a synthesizer, which simulates instruments physically correct. Output could be simply PWM (a FPGA is fast enough for a high output resolution) with an RC filter.
-- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Hi Frank, I also wonder what is meant by "esoteric". The things you propose are complicated, but (in my understanding) not really weird. (Still kind of fun to do, if you have the time.)
The examples Hypermodest gave are from the field of programming languages, not applications. That's the main difference between the example and his request.
For programming languages, there exists a wide range of well and easy understandable variations (Fortran, Pascal, C, Java...) and then there are things like brainfuck & co which are weird due to their limited syntax, but still turing complete. And that's considerably weird.
So what exits (or does not and is still to be discovered) for FPGAs that can be considered weird? One thing that comes to my mind is asynchronous design. Always leads to a lot of discussions. Especially when it shall be applied to FPGAs, because these are not designed to support such stuff. But what if someone creates a piece of asynchronous logic (at least some kind of FSM) that can be prooved(!) to run under all allowed conditions for that kind of chip.
Something else can be doing analog stuff with FPGAS. For instance, I remember a thing that was done on some old Computers. The programmers wrote a nonsense programm that caused the computer to send some classic Music over a radio frequency, which could be heared with an average receiver in the room. Problem today: low energy and very short connection length.
But today we are much advanced...every good lab today has some infrared camera...or not? :-) How about controlled heat generation inside the Chip that creates pictures on the chip case, detectable by an IR-Camera?
Best regards Eilert
Another idea would be to implement John von Neumann's Universal Constructor:
The web site says, it needs weeks to compute the replicatation, but with a FPGA it should be done in seconds.
The resoultion for the cellular automaton in the program was 640x1640, so I think you need many FPGAs for true parallel processing, but would be interesting and esoteric like the brainfuck programming language :-)
-- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
You don't even need an FPGA for a brainfuck processor, some students here did a brainfuck processor using CPLDs. (Well, actually they said it was an Ook! processor, but the languages map one to one to each other.)
Since they are only allowed to use CPLD:s and plain 74xx logic in this course, suffice to say that it is beneficial to design a processor as simple as possible :) Most people design more advanced processors though. The advantage with the Ook! processor was that there was some readily available programs already written for it :)
/Andreas
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