Digilent Expansion Modules / Digilent Projects – Blog / Product Applications – Digilent Blog

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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How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

Debouncing Circuits

Pushbuttons are an inherent source of problems inside of sensitive circuits. Ideally, we like to think that when a button is pressed it is either “pressed” or “not pressed” without any sort of funny business. Unfortunately, as pushbuttons are a mechanical component, a lack of funny business simply isn’t going to be the case.

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FPGA Products: What They Are & How to Use Them - Digilent / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

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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Digilent Expansion Modules / Digilent Software Solutions: What They Are & How to Use Them / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

I2C in LabVIEW

I recently published an Instructable on how to use I2C in LabVIEW using LabVIEW MakerHub LINX, chipKIT WF32, and PmodGYRO as an example. Digilent sells a both LabVIEW Home Bundle and chipKIT WF32 in the LabVIEW Physical Computing Kit. In this Instructable, I go over how to read the data sheet to find what you’re looking for and how exactly to code what you find. This guide also details how to set up pull-up resistors for successful I2C communication.

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Digilent Expansion Modules

Color/Colour Invaders!

I was recently inspired to try out by Hamster’s own ​Colour Invaders project. As the name suggests, this project is similar in design to the classic Space Invaders game or (more similarly) the ​Casio’s Number Invaders on the calculator. The idea behind the game is that different colored “invaders” start marching down the LED strip and you have to fire missiles that match the color of the oncoming invader. Naturally, as you successfully destroy more of the attackers, the faster they come towards your base. Here is what you need to get started.

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About Digilent Forums – Digilent Blog

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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Digilent Projects – Blog / Digilent USB Scopes, Analyzers, Generators: Info & Use Cases

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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Digilent Education Processes – Blog / Digilent Product Accessories: What They Are, How to Use Them

Building Logic Gates with Transistors

This is a continuation of previous blogs about logic gates. Earlier you read about logic gates and their functions. Then you read about how to code logic gates in Verilog, VHDL, and C. Now its time to learn about creating logic gates with transistors. After reading all of these posts you’ll have learned about logic gate theory, coding logic gates in both hardware and software, and the physical hardware design of logic gates.

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How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog / Teaching and Training Product Applications – Digilent Blog

Instruction Pipelines

Implementation of an instruction pipeline is a common technique used when working with microprocessors. Pipelining improves operation and processing time. Microprocessors such as the Microchip® PIC32MX460F512L on the chipKIT Pro MX4 board use this technology to provide efficient processing and instruction execution. Though the process is sophisticated, it is actually quite simple in concept. In my explanation of instruction pipelines, I’ll specifically refer to the Microchip PIC32 microprocessor.

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