How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

With any upcoming projects you may be doing, will you be using transistors? A few months ago, Brandon wrote a post detailing the basics of transistors — what they are, how they work, how they can be used, etc.

The binary search tree (BST) is a data structure that is much different from the other structures that we’ve gone over so far. Unlike stacks, queues, and lists, a BST’s struct is not a “straight-line”. Each node in a BST has a left and right child node.

Now that we know about recursion, we can talk about an important topic in programming — recursive sorting algorithms!

For those of you that have been coding for awhile, you likely have heard about both interrupts and polling. These are both techniques that can be used to alert your system board, such as a chipKIT microcontroller, when an input has occurred. But what is the difference between these two methods? Is one better than the other? Let’s find out.

Welcome back to the Digilent Blog! Today we’re going to go over recursion! Recursion is when a function calls itself directly, or through another function. Sometimes we can’t solve a problem using loops (iteration), so we have to use recursion. Recursion is slower than iteration, difficult to debug, and it uses up more of the stack. But recursion can also have simpler code, so in some cases, the benefits outweigh the problems.

Have you ever seen those membrane keypads that are often on kids’ toys? Have you ever wanted to make your own?

If you’ve been around electronics for a while, you’ve probably noticed that components like resistors, capacitors, zener diodes and inductors come in some odd values. Looking at the chart above, there seems to be no clear rationale behind the values, but there is a pattern. 47kΩ resistors and 22μF capacitors are everywhere, but not 40kΩ or 50kΩ resistors, or 20μF or 30μF capacitors. So what’s the deal? It all has to do with preferred numbers.