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.
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.
As you may have surmised from Jesse’s post earlier, we have a new product, the fantastic Nexys Video! To learn more, I talked to Sam Bobrowicz, one of the people at Digilent who worked very hard to get this product released.
When perusing our site, you’ve probably noticed the section entitled programming solutions, or looked through our FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards and seen the acronym JTAG (Joint Test Action Group). …
A little while ago, you likely saw the post that I did on my Color Invaders project. It’s a lot of fun to play as is, but it was suggested that the game could be made even better if there were some sound effects included as well. I got it done with a few tweaks…
By now, you’re probably familiar with the ZYBO board. You’ve seen the ZYBOt, a tutorial for using embedded Linux with ZYBO, and how to tweet webcam photos with a ZYBO. Thanks to one intrepid Instructables user, you can now learn how to make a digital oscilloscope with a ZYBO.
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.
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.
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.
Digilent Adept is a light-weight program that allows users to quickly load .bit files onto your FPGA chip. The Power of Adept is in its simplicity and speed.
Dharsan, a new Digilent intern, used the LabVIEW Home Bundle and the NI myRIO to create a circuit that controls the speed of a fan based on a temperature reading.
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.
In keeping with our open-source initiative, the Digilent Marketing Team used open-source parts to build a robot. This is an altered version of the MRK Line Robot, which uses only open-source components.
What do you use to connect your Pmods to their host boards? We now have two new options, the 6-pin Pmod Cable Kit and the 12-pin Pmod Cable Kit.
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.
Here are some of the tricks I have learned while using LabVIEW that will make your life much easier!
Around this time last year, our very own James Colvin explained in a blog post about how to make a digital thermometer using parts from the chipKIT Starter Kit. How …
If you’ve been around the Digilent Blog, you’ve probably seen a lot of robots. Remember Susan the Line-Following Pig? Well, I recently found a small, portable solar panel in the MakerSpace at Digilent and I was inspired to build a solar-powered robot. Similar to Susan, I will be using the chipKIT Pro MX4 and the Digilent Motor Robot Kit (MRK) for my solar-powered design. However, when I first came up with this idea, it was the middle of winter. That being said, sunlight was quite a bit more scarce, especially up here in Pullman, WA. I first had to ask an important question: will I have enough sun?
Earlier today, Josh (a fellow intern and blog contributor) wrote a blog post about logic gates. After reading through Josh’s post and gaining an understanding of the concepts and basic functions of those gates, I figured now would be the perfect time to learn some code. I am going to go over each logic gate and it’s code in Verilog (a hardware language), VHDL (another hardware language) and C (software language).
The very basis of computers is binary. In electronics everything can be boiled down to 1s and 0s. Logic gates are digital circuits that take one or more binary inputs and produce a binary output. You can check out the basis of logic with Boolean Algebra.
Upon his retirement from Microsoft in 1998, Gene Apperson and his family relocated to Pullman, Washington. After a few years, Gene decided to go back to school as an undergraduate in mechanical engineering. A professor, Bob Richards, soon asked Gene to switch to the Master’s program, even though most of his background was in electrical engineering. He ended up taking a VLSI design class from none other than Clint Cole. While Gene ended up asking Clint whether he would be able to do well in the class, they got to talking and decided to start a company together.
One of the really cool projects to come out of the Digilent Design Contest is a virtual touchscreen game hands-on tutorial for the ZYBO. This Instructable provides step-by-step instructions for customizing hardware to emulate a touchscreen on a simple TFT (thin-film transistor) monitor using camera and finger detection
As people come back from Maker Faire having seen — and made — some truly amazing things, we’d like to reflect back upon a fun project that one of our interns spent a lot of time on last year, the soda can theremin.
The goal of this Instructable by myronking is to build a simple two-wheeled motorized robot controlled by a ZedBoard. You’ll learn about communication and control logic with FPGAs.
A project that I’ve been working on (and off) for while has been the titular tweeting webcam photos with a ZYBO.
