If you’ve been keeping up with Digilent over that last couple of years, you may have heard about our merger with National Instruments. We’ve collaborated to create new products, and we’ve expanded our capabilities to work with more of NI’s products. One of those products is Multisim, a full-function testing and simulation environment for analog, digital, and power electronics designs.
Happy Groundhog Day! At Digilent, we have Punxsutawney Sam the groundhog to tell us whether we’ll have more winter to look forward to. Our 3D-printed friend is here to tell us whether winter will wane!
We all know how much of a hassle it can be to safely transport your electronics, and let’s face it, the protective cases that many of our boards previously came in were flimsy, unaccommodating, and caused a great deal of stress for our customers. Well, we’ve responded to all of your feedback and I’m here to talk about our new Project Boxes!
As you probably know, one of Digilent’s major focuses is producing FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards and educating the public on FPGA design. One of the classes I was in last semester focused on FGPA design. This class is EE324 at WSU, which is taught by Digilent’s own Clint Cole. He gave a background lecture on the History of FPGA chips. Not only was it an extremely interesting lecture, but it also helped me understand the huge leaps in logic design that have been made since the 1960s. This is the history that led to the development of FPGA chips. The chips are the parts that Xilinx makes that we use on our FPGA boards.
You may have heard of the NetFPGA-SUME, Digilent’s amazingly advanced board that features one of the largest and most complex FPGAs ever produced. But what is the story behind it?
With great excitement, we would like to show off the NetFPGA-Sume, our most complicated board to date, featuring the Xilinx, Inc. Virtex-7 FPGA!
Our new product, the Nexys4 DDR, is now available for sale! We have been anxiously awaiting this board’s release ever since we received an end-of-life notice from Micron (our memory provider) about cellular RAM that we had been using on all of our Nexys-class products. Rather than strip features off the current Nexys4, we decided to evolve the product line to accept DDR Memory. Check it out now!
When working with microcontrollers, it’s pretty straightforward to have your system board “listen” for an input that you would give it and have it do some sort of action to show that it noticed your input, such as pressing a button to light up an LED. Listening to a set of inputs and then comparing them to a predetermined set, like in the Simon Says game, is a little more involved but definitely doable. But what if we did not compare to any internal values and the system board has no idea how many inputs we might provide?
It’s time for another Pmod feature! Today, we’re going to check out the Connector Pmods. Rather than just being strictly limited to a pure input Pmod or pure output Pmod, all of these Pmods are able to easily communicate with the system board in both directions. Although many of these Pmods might be chalked up to simple “pass-through” modules, I certainly wouldn’t label them that way. These Pmods offer some invaluable features that are otherwise not so easily obtained.
Today we’re going to compare two different ways of increasing the functionality of a system board: Pmods and shields. Those of you have that have been following the Digilent Blog know that Pmods are Digilent’s series of peripheral modules with 6-12 pins that can easily be connected to appropriate pins on a system board to provide extra functionality and include audio amplifiers, GPS receivers, USB to UART interface, seven-segment displays, accelerometers, H-bridges with input feedback, analog-to-digital converters, and much more. For the rest of you who have been in this sector of the electronics industry, you know that shields are a type of board that you can plug directly on top of your microcontroller in a nice pin-to-pin fashion for expanded functionality. Although you might suspect which of these two items I prefer, we’ll check out the advantages of both of them.
In the not too distant past, we made a couple of posts on Pmods that can help drive motors as well as a post on stepper motors. Today, we’re going to check out running multiple servo motors on a chipKIT board. Why would we want to do this? Well, aside from the nice feeling that comes from successfully doing some extreme multitasking, we’d also be able to run some super cool mechatronics projects, such as a robot arm!
Dave Jones from the EEV Blog and co-host on the Amp Hour Podcast did a thorough review of one of our most popular kits, the Analog Discovery.
Last month, I described a simple stateless web application using Python and Plotly’s Dash module. It created a dashboard allowing users to select waveform channels, update rate, and the number …
Software defined radio (SDR) replaces traditional radio frequency (RF) hardware with programmable software, giving you dynamic control over modulation, bandwidth, and frequency. This technology allows for wideband, flexible experimentation across …
Fritzing is a free tool that allows users to create clean and professional images of electronics projects for teaching or sharing. Digilent uses Fritzing in all of our intern-created projects, and we’re working closely with Fritzing to have a bin of Digilent parts soon.
At Digilent, we’re proud to support educators and students around the world in bringing digital design concepts to life. One recent example comes from Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey, where …
