Month: April 2015
Guide

How Much Is One GB of Memory?

We hear words like gigabyte (GB) and terabyte thrown around a lot, but what can we actually do with that much memory? At the most basic level of computing, we have bits, which are going to be either a 1 or 0. A byte is 8 bits. We’re going to represent a byte as a dot.

Read More
Around Digilent

Throwback Thursday: Early Digilent Packaging

When Norm MacDonald started working full-time for Digilent back in 2005 – 2006, most of our products were sold in very basic packaging (think anti-static bags and plain white boxes). Totally understandable for a starting company. A few boards were given a bit of branding, though. The Basys and Nexys, of course. These were the simple boxes those came in at the time. (They may have been done by Clint or Jim or some combination of the two.)

Read More
Guide

Libraries

This week happens to be National Library week, and although Digilent is not a library, we certainly use them! I’m not referring to public libraries, though (although I am personally a fan of them); rather, I’m talking about the C++ libraries that are widely used with our microcontrollers. Although C++ libraries are not quite the same as an IP for FPGAs, they serve a similar purpose. These libraries include a set of predefined functions that perform a specific task, such as sending and receiving a set of data over SPI, that the user can use without having to define what they do.

Read More
Guide

The (Ultimate) ZYBOt Guide

Back in March, we released a blog post announcing the ZYBOt. There was a set of Instructables and a video showing what the ZYBOt is all about. If you check those out, you can see that the ZYBOt is remote-controlled and has a video feed that can be displayed to a computer. The ZYBOt is a great project for people that want to dive into working with FPGAs and Linux.

Read More
Around Digilent

Turbo Strikes Back

In a contest between robot and human…the robot won (at least this round). Breaking one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, our normally friendly Turbo managed to get in a hit at one of our interns last week when she was troubleshooting.

Read More
Guide

What Are Arrays, Again?

Back in August, one of our interns told us why arrays aren’t actually very frightening. However, if you’re anything like me, that information might have…slipped. So I decided to take another look at arrays!

Read More