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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Digilent Projects – Blog

Solar Powered Robot — UV Index vs. Solar Energy

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?

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

Coding Logic Gates

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).

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Around Digilent – Digilent Blog

Throwback Thursday: Digilent’s Beginnings, Gene Apperson’s Story

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.

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How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

The Science of LEDs

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?

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