Hacking the eeColor Color3

I’m taking a short break from the BlackIce-II to spend some quality time in my garage with the eeColor color3. Originally a real consumer product built with a Cyclone 4 FPGA, a DRAM, an HDMI receiver and an HDMI transmitter, it got its 15 minutes of fame when it was featured on Hackaday as a potentially really cheap FPGA development board.

A few people mapped out the IOs of the FPGA and built a bitcoin miner with it, but I’m not aware of any projects that are using all the features of the board.

Today, most color3 boxes sell for $20 and more (+shipping) on eBay or Amazon, but I was able to grab one for just $10+shipping.

It’d be a shame if the scattered reverse engineering information of the color3 that can be found on the web would disappear due to standard web-rot, so I’ve started a Hackaday project and a GitHub page to gather all the information I can find today, and, hopefully, also document my own progress in getting all the chips to work.

References

All posts in this series:

• Hacking the eeColor Color3
• eeColor Color3: Getting Ready for Reverse Engineering
• eeColor Color3: SiI9136 and SiI9233 Connections to FPGA
• eeColor Color3: HDMI TX is Up!
• eeColor Color3: SiI9233 and SiI9136 I2C Traces
• eeColor Color3: HDMI RX to HDMI TX is UP!!!