Realtime FPGA Julia Set Traversing on Altera Cyclone 3

Another video showing off my FPGA Mandelbrot/Julia Set rendering engine.

The Julia sets are traversed by adjusting the Julia parameter input, and observing the results. These manipulations produce growing and shrinking swirls and coils and other effects as the coordinates are swept.

The mandelbrot set makes a few appearances, as I move around and zoom in to look for interesting places to check out the Julia sets. The most interesting ones are found near the border of the Mandelbrot set itself (the black central area) and the surrounding coloured regions.

The swirls and patterns of the Julia sets reflect the particular place of the Mandelbrot set that is being explored.

Everything is being controlled using a stock SNES controller. Math is performed in 36 bit precision, with approximately 1.5 billion multiplies a second.

It is running on a Cyclone 3 EP3C25 FPGA, and employs 7 parallel Mandelbrot cores to produce these images. Output is via NTSC video, directly generated by the FPGA digitally and spat out a DAC which is then captured.

Music is from the Delta SID file, by Rob Hubbard, played on the FPGA synth.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• FPGA
• Mandelbrot
• Julia
• Real Time
• Cyclone
• altera

[Schoening91]

Spacey !  favorited

[helmut666kohl]

Wicked stuff dude!

I want one! Maybe I should check out Verilog after all...

[storerestore]

Great work, and great choice of soundtrack :)

[dra999]

cool.

[mirabilis]

Are you going to release the source to your FPGA synth?

[lebasson]

I totally cannot put any of your tech ramblings in context, but I think it's awesome :)