Making Membrane Keypads
Have you ever seen those membrane keypads that are often on kids’ toys? Have you ever wanted to make your own?
How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog
Generating High-Frequency Radio Signals Out of a VGA Port
Over at our forums, we have a lot of great projects that both Digilent employees and users have contributed! One of the members of our user community and a regular contributor to the forum, hamster, used the Basys 3 to generate high-frequency radio signals from its VGA (video graphics array) port.
How to Choose a Resistor for Your Design
Take a look at a circuit board and chances are you’re going to find a resistor or two. Most boards today use surface-mount device (SMD) technology, so the components are almost too small to see sometimes, but they are on there, I promise. How do engineers decide which resistors to use in the design? Sometimes it depends on how you want that portion of the circuit to perform, as in the case of an op-amp. Other times it’s to prevent too much current from passing through a given point in a circuit, which is why they are often called current-limiting resistors. Maybe you want a simple way to divide the voltage or current. The reality is that there are numerous ways to use resistors, and oftentimes, the defining the resistor value is up to you.
Why Do Electronic Components Have Such Odd Values?
If you’ve been around electronics for a while, you’ve probably noticed that components like resistors, capacitors, zener diodes and inductors come in some odd values. Looking at the chart above, there seems to be no clear rationale behind the values, but there is a pattern. 47kΩ resistors and 22μF capacitors are everywhere, but not 40kΩ or 50kΩ resistors, or 20μF or 30μF capacitors. So what’s the deal? It all has to do with preferred numbers.
A Brief Intro to C++
In previous blog posts, we’ve programmed mainly in C. But with a blog post about classes coming up, I figured a short post about how C++ works would be helpful for everybody.
FPGA Products: What They Are & How to Use Them - Digilent / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog
History of the FPGA
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.
Number Systems
Today, we are going to learn about number systems. A “number system” is defined here as “any notation for the representation of numerals or numbers.” We naturally use the decimal (base 10) system, meaning we use the numbers 0-9 to represent all the other numbers. The three types of number systems that we are going to talk about today are decimal, binary, and hexadecimal, but there are many more!
How Do I Use Digilent Products at School? (Digital Edition)
As you learned from my previous post (the Analog Edition version of this post), we used the Analog Parts Kit and Analog Discovery in EE352 at Washington State University (WSU) to make an AM radio transmitter and receiver. Not only do we use Digilent products in EE352, but we also used Digilent parts in EE324 (Fundamentals of Digital Systems) — the digital lab class I was taking.
What Is Hysteresis? Explanation & Examples
Hysteresis is something that is all around us. Its effects can be found in many disciplines, like economics and biology, but especially in engineering and physics. But what is it? How do we use it? Let’s do some digging to find out.
What Is a Struct in Programming?
Structures are a group of related variables that are placed under one name. Unlike arrays, structures are not limited to one data type. The struct keyword will allow us to create a structure.
Is Boolean a Data Type?
True! Boolean is a data type. However, it’s also a term that gets thrown around in the electronics world by programmers presuming that everybody else knows what they are talking about; I can personally attest that this is not always the case. In light of this, let’s go over some of the data types that are commonly used in programming.
How Do I Use Digilent Products at School? (Analog Edition)
One of the reasons I like working at Digilent is that we are primarily an educational company. Because of that, I thought some of you might want to know how we use Digilent products in our classwork at Washington State University (WSU).
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