Yes, I know it's a completely ridiculous project. It has absolutely no commercial value whatsoever. But, It's kept me busy during my spare time and I've learned a lot about Composite Video, FPGA's and VHDL. I also got to do some analog design, prototyping, soldering, wirewrapping, system design, and troubleshooting (lots of troubleshooting). Just what the doctor ordered. AND, of course, it would get my name to the top of each leader board (not as if that's important).

So, back to the story. I knew the only way I could beat Alex was to build a computer that could watch the game being played, process some information, and play the notes on the guitar.

The first thoughts were of some kind of sensors I could stick to the front of the TV that would watch a game being played and signal a small microcontroller to press the correct button on the guitar. A microcontroller based black box with multiple sensors in and the proper selection of 6 electronic key presses out. Pretty simple I thought – and it probably would have worked out fine if I didn’t run into my friend Steve and tell him of my idea.

Steve, you see, is a video engineer and was responsible for building one of the first non-linear editing systems in the 80’s. No self respecting video guy would let anyone build a kluge system like the one I was describing. This system, he said, needed to plug directly into the composite video output of the Wii and decode the video on the fly. For months Steve had been trying to get me to come up with a project that would be well served by using an FPGA at its core, and he saw this as the perfect project. Composite Video in, a little analog processing and level shifting to condition the composite video signal into inputs to a Digilent Spartan-3 FPGA demo board, a circuit to highlight video on the screen under computer control, and drivers to actually press the keys at the appropriate time. Sounded fun, so off I went to collect the appropriate parts and build the breadboard.

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