How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

LEDs are one of the coolest electronic components. They can brighten up any circuits project and turn it in to an eye-catching bonanza of blinking lights. Okay, corny imagery aside, they’re pretty cool. But have you ever thought of how they actually work? You likely already know that LED stands for light emitting diode. Where does the light emit from, though? There are no bulbs or filaments in an LED. So what’s going on in there that produces the glow that we love to have in all of our circuits?

In one of my first circuits courses, the professor’s favorite words of advice were to “keep calm and remember KCL, KVL, and Ohm’s law.” With these three concepts, just about any electrical circuit can be analyzed and understood. Granted, things get a little more complicated when you add concepts like inductance and capacitance, but KCL, KVL, and Ohm’s law form the foundation of all circuit analysis. Brandon mentioned Ohm’s law in his blog post on how to choose a resistor for your design, so I will only be discussing KCL and KVL.

We hear words like gigabyte (GB) and terabyte thrown around a lot, but what can we actually do with that much memory? At the most basic level of computing, we have bits, which are going to be either a 1 or 0. A byte is 8 bits. We’re going to represent a byte as a dot.

This week happens to be National Library week, and although Digilent is not a library, we certainly use them! I’m not referring to public libraries, though (although I am personally a fan of them); rather, I’m talking about the C++ libraries that are widely used with our microcontrollers. Although C++ libraries are not quite the same as an IP for FPGAs, they serve a similar purpose. These libraries include a set of predefined functions that perform a specific task, such as sending and receiving a set of data over SPI, that the user can use without having to define what they do.

Back in August, one of our interns told us why arrays aren’t actually very frightening. However, if you’re anything like me, that information might have…slipped. So I decided to take another look at arrays!

We’re going to look at integrated circuits, specifically the integrated circuit in the chipKIT MAX32.

How does Amazon improve its customer service? It uses an AI to learn user preferences (by tracking purchases) and generate recommendations. This is an AI that learns over time. And now Amazon is making one of its algorithms available for programmers and other businesses to use.

Aleph 1.0 is a remote-controlled robotic manipulator for biological or chemical probes. Its purpose is to allow scientists to safely manipulate and analyze biohazardous or toxic substances, or to simply observe or interact with small probes and/or devices that must be contained in controlled environments. Instructables user kovari_andrei provides a tutorial for doing just that. It uses the chipKIT Pro MX7, and we’re thrilled to see our products being used in such cool ways.

Originally, this blog post was going to be about how Linux works with its kernel and everything. That turned out to be extremely dry, and it was a jumbled mess to try to fit everything into a blog post. Just check out the Linux wiki page for all that stuff. Instead this post is going to be more about parts of Linux that people should know about. Linux is used widely for developing software and embedded systems. One example is the Zybot, partially developed by Kaitlyn and me!