Recently, a user of our products posted a tutorial about using a chipKIT uC32 to remotely control an FM Radio. We always love to see our users creating cool projects and try to give space here not only to projects created by us at Digilent but also by you the user. This project does require the use of multiple components and could be a bit overwhelming to a beginner, but we encourage you to try it out if you so choose!
A friend of mine came into town for Christmas and I wanted to do some sort of photography project with him. A few months ago, there were some pictures floating around the internet from Stephen Orlando, who took LEDs and attached them to a kayak paddle and kayaked around a lake, and through rapids. I wanted to do something similar. The first night wasn’t very organized. We went into the woods with just the LED strip, the chipKIT board (the uC32), and a battery.
The ZYBO Smart Car was developed by Digilent China. It is one of the items in the Zrobot line, the educational kit solely developed by Digilent China. The smart car is powered by the Digilent ZYBO that features Xilinx Zynq technology. Users can control the robot from an Android phone using the Bluetooth interface within 20m. The OS is Linux. Users can develop the software and Linux driver using Xilinx Vivado.
Last June, one of our interns wrote about a project he did making his own metronome. Using the chipKIT Basic I/O Shield with a servo motor and a speaker buzzer, you can make something fantastic! James used parts from the chipKIT Starter Kit.
For our holiday ugly sweater party, our web developer, Sam Logan, added some blinking LEDs to his using a chipKIT microcontroller. His Instructable was featured on the chipKIT blog.
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!
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?
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!
I really enjoy what I do here at Digilent. I get to work with some of the best tools available for students, professionals, and hobbyists alike. One of the things I like most is how easy it is to get your hands on a good quality microcontroller board, like the chipKIT Uno32. But even once you get a good board, it will still need to be programmed.
As many of you know, it is possible with many types of displays, such as LCDs and LED displays, to create your own custom characters and, naturally, display them. However, to create your own characters, you need to be able to create a bitmap of how your character (or characters) look. We will be working with the PmodOLED and it’s corresponding library to create our own characters.
If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ve probably seen something about us setting up our very own MakerSpace here at Digilent. We’ve come a long way from a few cluttered cubicles to getting our MakerSpace up and running. We have just about everything you can think of to make any project imaginable: a 3D printer, a soldering station, breadboards, buttons, copious amounts of LEDs, and more! I thought up a just-for-fun project and wanted to test drive the MakerSpace to see what I could build.
At one point or another, we have all played the “Simon Says” game. In this game, one person, Simon (or Susan, Chad, or whoever happens to be the leader), will say “Simon says” and tell all of the other players to do something, such as raise their left hand. The catch in this game is that if the leader tells the other players to do something without saying the words “Simon says” and the other players do it anyway, they’re out. I personally really enjoy playing Simon Says, but I thought it could even be more fun if you could play Simon Says with a bunch of LEDs…
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Digilent has partnered with CircuitBread to create high-quality electrical engineering lessons on the topic of DC Circuits. Utilizing Digilent’s resources and engineers in conjunction with CircuitBread’s experience in educational content, …