Smart Irrigation System

During the summer, gardens abound — so many people are keeping an eye out for their sun-ripened, home-grown tomatoes or for that lovely hydrangea that’s just the right shade of blue. But summers are also a very hectic time. So how do you maintain that garden and make sure it receives the care it needs? One of the projects created for the Digilent Design Contest 2015 is a smart irrigation system intended to work with an Android device to see to it your garden gets the moisture it craves.

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Getting Started with Xilinx Vivado and the Nexys 4

We’ve posted plenty of projects before that make use of Vivado. But how do you begin using it? This Instructable provides a guide to getting started with using Xilinx’s Vivado CAD with the Digilent Nexys 4. Alex uses Verilog to create the logic design. The Digilent Intro to Verilog Project provides an introduction to logic design.

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FPIDroidHouse with a Nexys 3

As smart homes are becoming more and more de rigueur, Instructables user skorpyon1992 created a timely project, the FPiDroid House. This project is still in beta testing, but has shown a lot of potential so far. By using the Nexys 3 (or any of our FPGA boards), you too could connect a lot of your devices to monitor and control your very own smart home.

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Working with the Digilent Forum

As most of you know, we have our own Forum where anybody can go post questions and projects involving Digilent products: FPGAs, microcontrollers, any of our scopes, National Instruments products like the LabVIEW Home Bundle, Pmods, programming solutions, you name it. With this wide variety of products and an even wider variety of potential questions, the Forum can be a little daunting to navigate. This post will help first-time Digilent Forum users get the best experience out of the Digilent Forum.

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Soda Can Theremin Video

We recently published a video about a simple Theremin built using the Analog Discovery and the Analog Parts Kit. A Theremin is an electronic musical instrument which essentially turns the user into a variable capacitor. The user can then adjust the frequency of the sound produced by the instrument by moving their hand in relation to an antenna. As the distance to the antenna changes, the capacitance also changes, thus changing the signal frequency. In the Theremin showcased in this video, a recycled soda can is used as the antenna.

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