Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If you’re wondering how to celebrate and add some green to your life, consider this — improving your solar panels with a microcontroller! This project from Hackaday uses an Arduino to harvest more energy from the panel than would otherwise be available.
Did you know you can melt metal using magnetic fields? It seems pretty crazy, but it’s possible.
If you have a computer, you may have heard of Linux. Linux is a free ad open-source operating system, where the “base” code can be used and modified by anyone. Some of Digilent’s boards (like the ZYBO) use Linux. Linux is great for programming and development, but isn’t as user-friendly as other operating systems.
Inter-integrated-circuit, more commonly known as I²C (generally pronounced I-squared-C), is a communication style originally developed by Phillips Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductor). Its design allows multiple components to be able to talk to each other on the same data line, making it widely used in a variety of systems, including Pmods. As a fan of Pmods, I’m in favor of learning how you can communicate with them and get them what you want to do. Let’s find out more.
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.
MPIDE comes with a nice serial monitor where you are able to print out values that your system board has measured onto your computer screen. But if you are able to print things onto your computer screen, wouldn’t it make sense if the chipKIT board also accepted and processed values that we typed into the serial monitor? It would make a lot of sense, which is probably why we can do just that. Let’s find out how.
At this point in reading the blog and going through the learn material, you might realize that there is a lot of FPGA code. It doesn’t look like C, it doesn’t look like Java…what is it?
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?
We’ve got big news: Analog Discovery Studio Max (ADS Max) just won the Best Test & Measurement of the Year award at the EE Awards Asia 2025! This isn’t just …
Hello folks, Oscar Fonseca here, Product Manager for NI Academic. One of the most rewarding parts of my role is listening to educators and turning their feedback into solutions that …
Choosing the best data logger for your specific requirements can feel overwhelming. With so many types available, it’s important to focus on the features that matter most for your work—whether …
Introduction The classic electronics bench often brings to mind a large, heavy oscilloscope with a dedicated screen and complex front panel. While these instruments remain powerful, a new generation of …
