Digilent Products: What They Are and How to Use Them
Digilent Products: What They Are and How to Use Them / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

With So Many Starter Kit Options, Which One Should I Choose?

We here at Digilent Inc. are proud to be a leading hardware provider for educators, students, professionals, hobbyists, and hackers alike. We have developed numerous devices to help with every stage of developing projects, from learning the basics to prototyping to finished projects. If you can think of it, we have the hardware to help you build it. So it should come as no surprise that we have a few options to choose from should you decide you want a parts kit to go along with your new Electronics Explorer Board or chipKIT Max32. So, which kit is right for you? Well I’m here to help make that decision a little easier. I will be discussing three kits that we offer: the chipKIT Starter Kit, the Analog Parts Kit, and the TI myParts kit.

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FPGA Products: What They Are & How to Use Them - Digilent / Workshops – Digilent Blog

FPGA Design Flow Using Vivado Workshop!

Digilent is proud to announce that together with our Brazilian distribution partner, Anacom, and our academic partner Xilinx University Program, we will be hosting a workshop, “FPGA Design Flow using Vivado,” from Oct 29-30. This course will provide professors with an introduction to digital design tool flow in Xilinx All Programmable devices using Xilinx Vivado Design Suite. It will be held at Escola Politécnica da UFBA, Brazil. Attendees will use the Digilent Nexys 4 and the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite to gain the hands-on experience with digital design, basic HDL knowledge, Xilinx 7-series architecture overview, and Xilinx Vivado design suite.

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Digilent Expansion Modules

Digilent Pmods — Motor Output

As we continue on with our exploration of the Pmods, after checking out some of the Output Pmods like the DAC, Audio, and Visual Pmods, we find ourselves at the final set (at least for now) of output Pmods. These five Pmods all drive different types of motors including servo, DC, and stepper motors. Through these Pmods, you can get your project on the move, whether its a robot arm, a box monster, or a line-following robot.

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Digilent Expansion Modules / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

Pmod Communication: Serial Peripheral Interface

A while ago, we learned that one of the ways that Pmods are able to communicate with their host board is through SPI. We learned then that serial peripheral interface is a type of communication protocol where the “master” board and the “slave” device (in this case, a Pmod) are able to send bits of data to each other at the same time with the host board controlling the timing of the communication. Although this is a nice overview, it is my personal experience that theoretical overviews are not the most helpful in actually implementing what we are learning. This begs the question: how do you use SPI? Lets find out!

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Digilent Expansion Modules

Digilent Pmods — Visual Pmods

As we continue on with our Pmod series featuring one of Digilent’s largest product lines, we find ourselves needing to see what’s going on inside of our microcontrollers and FPGAs as they race through their code at 80,000,000 times a second (or even faster!). Once again, Digilent has a variety of solutions to solve our dilemma. Our visual Pmods range from simple LEDs and a seven-segment display (SSD) to complex OLED and LCD screens.

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Digilent Expansion Modules

Digilent Pmods – Audio Pmods

You may recall a post we had a few days back on the Pmods that offered a DAC. As I mentioned then, DACs are used for a wide variety of applications but one of the most common ways that you see a DAC being used is in audio applications. Digilent’s Pmod line offers several audio peripheral modules that do just that.

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Digilent Expansion Modules

Digilent Pmods: Communication Is Key

We are going to continue with our Pmod series and talk about how you get the Pmod (peripheral module) to do what you want it to do. After all, it is not the best plan (especially in electronics) to just plug something in to a random spot and hope the device works correctly. The vast majority of the peripheral modules in the Pmod line collect or receive data (or both) and need to communicate this data with the host board. A GPS module that doesn’t send its coordinates to the host or an audio amplifier that does not receive data from the host are not terribly useful. Successful communication is key in any relationship, electronic or otherwise.

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Digilent Expansion Modules

History of the PmodLS1

As you learned from James’ post, Digilent offers 63 Pmods! Each of those products has its own story of its conception and evolution. One of those products that had a very interesting beginning is the PmodLS1.

A few weeks ago while chatting with James (another intern) and Gene (our co-founder) we were discussing how the company began and how the board design process works. In this discussion we discovered that the Pmod LS1 has a beginning in education at Washington State University.

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