This week happens to be National Library week, and although Digilent is not a library, we certainly use them! I’m not referring to public libraries, though (although I am personally a fan of them); rather, I’m talking about the C++ libraries that are widely used with our microcontrollers. Although C++ libraries are not quite the same as an IP for FPGAs, they serve a similar purpose. These libraries include a set of predefined functions that perform a specific task, such as sending and receiving a set of data over SPI, that the user can use without having to define what they do.

Back in August, one of our interns told us why arrays aren’t actually very frightening. However, if you’re anything like me, that information might have…slipped. So I decided to take another look at arrays!

We’re going to look at integrated circuits, specifically the integrated circuit in the chipKIT MAX32.

How does Amazon improve its customer service? It uses an AI to learn user preferences (by tracking purchases) and generate recommendations. This is an AI that learns over time. And now Amazon is making one of its algorithms available for programmers and other businesses to use.

Aleph 1.0 is a remote-controlled robotic manipulator for biological or chemical probes. Its purpose is to allow scientists to safely manipulate and analyze biohazardous or toxic substances, or to simply observe or interact with small probes and/or devices that must be contained in controlled environments. Instructables user kovari_andrei provides a tutorial for doing just that. It uses the chipKIT Pro MX7, and we’re thrilled to see our products being used in such cool ways.

Originally, this blog post was going to be about how Linux works with its kernel and everything. That turned out to be extremely dry, and it was a jumbled mess to try to fit everything into a blog post. Just check out the Linux wiki page for all that stuff. Instead this post is going to be more about parts of Linux that people should know about. Linux is used widely for developing software and embedded systems. One example is the Zybot, partially developed by Kaitlyn and me!

Now that we have Linux booted up on our computer, we can get programming. What happens if we want to create web pages? Well, we need to set-up our LAMP server. LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. This blog post goes in conjunction with a relevant Instructable about setting up our LAMP server, so just like the previous blog post about dual-booting Ubuntu, this is going to go over more of why we’re doing this. What the LAMP server will allow us to do it create a local host that will let us communicate with the Internet.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If you’re wondering how to celebrate and add some green to your life, consider this — improving your solar panels with a microcontroller! This project from Hackaday uses an Arduino to harvest more energy from the panel than would otherwise be available.

Did you know you can melt metal using magnetic fields? It seems pretty crazy, but it’s possible.