Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles: Working with other Zynq-Based Boards
Over at the Xilinx blog (the excellent Xcell Daily Blog), Adam Taylor reviewed his experience working with some of the Zynq-based boards. One of those reviews is for the ZYBO. …
New Product — the PmodMIC3
We have a new member of the Pmod family — our latest addition is the PmodMIC3. The Digilent PmodMIC3 is a small microphone module with a digital interface. An improvement …
Understanding Gigabyte: How Much is One GB of Memory?
We hear words like gigabyte (GB) and terabyte thrown around a lot, but what can we actually do with that much memory? At the most basic level of computing, we have bits, which are going to be either a 1 or 0. A byte is 8 bits. We’re going to represent a byte as a dot.
Throwback Thursday: Early Digilent Packaging
When Norm MacDonald started working full-time for Digilent back in 2005 – 2006, most of our products were sold in very basic packaging (think anti-static bags and plain white boxes). Totally understandable for a starting company. A few boards were given a bit of branding, though. The Basys and Nexys, of course. These were the simple boxes those came in at the time. (They may have been done by Clint or Jim or some combination of the two.)
Tic-Tac-Toe with FPGAs
Who doesn’t love the classic game of tic-tac-toe? And now it can be made new and fresh with the Nexys 2 FPGA board!
Libraries
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.
The (Ultimate) ZYBOt Guide
Back in March, we released a blog post announcing the ZYBOt. There was a set of Instructables and a video showing what the ZYBOt is all about. If you check those out, you can see that the ZYBOt is remote-controlled and has a video feed that can be displayed to a computer. The ZYBOt is a great project for people that want to dive into working with FPGAs and Linux.
Turbo Strikes Back
In a contest between robot and human…the robot won (at least this round). Breaking one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, our normally friendly Turbo managed to get in a hit at one of our interns last week when she was troubleshooting.
Throwback Thursday: The Original Cerebot Line
You’re probably familiar with our chipKIT Pro MX7 and MX4 by now. But how did this line of microcontrollers get its start?
What Are Arrays, Again?
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!
Projects Using the Analog Discovery
Are you looking for a good project to do with your Analog Discovery? On the Digilent Forum, Alex loaded a few of them from students at Sri Vishnu Engineering College for Women in southeastern India.
Integrated Circuits in Digilent Products
We’re going to look at integrated circuits, specifically the integrated circuit in the chipKIT MAX32.
Learning the AI behind Amazon
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, the Internet-Controlled Microscope Robotic Manipulator
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.
What Instructors Want from Labs
In a Wired magazine article, physics professor Rhett Allain answers some of the questions he gets from students about what he’s looking for in the lab.
Digilent Software Solutions: What They Are & How to Use Them / Digilent USB Scopes, Analyzers, Generators: Info & Use Cases
Basic Waveform Measurement and Display
If you or anyone you know is learning the basics of electronics one of the things they’ll have to figure out is basic testing and measurement. We have a great project on the Learn site that can introduce one to basic waveform measurement and display with the help of the Analog Discovery.
Throwback Thursday: Digilab Begins
A few weeks ago, we did a throwback that included the D2XL. And now we can take a look back at the original Digilab I! It’s one of the first boards we made (circa 2001), and it’s always interesting to see how far we’ve come.
The Analog Parts Kit
The Analog Parts Kit contains a large selection of components perfect for creating a wide variety of useful circuits & devices. Featuring Analog Devices components, the kit includes transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes, sensors, and variety of useful ICs, including op amps, converters, and regulators. Finally, the kit also comes with an assortment of lead wires, a solderless breadboard, and a screwdriver.
FPGA Products: What They Are & How to Use Them - Digilent / How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog
Logging FPGA Pins on a Host PC
Have you ever wanted to log FPGA pins on a host PC? Well, Digilent forums user hamster has done a project showing how, which you can find here!
The “Boring” Robot
Two California hotels tested autonomous service robots over a six-month period. Reviews from their customers were overwhelmingly positive (except when aforementioned customers were intoxicated). They will be rolling out their next wave of autonomous service robots, called the Relay.
A Crash Course on Linux (Just The Good Parts)
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!
Throwback Thursday: Starting Digilent
How did Digilent begin? Here’s our story.
Breadboard Battleship
Did you ever play the game Battleship as a child? I remember finding it incredibly fun. This weekend, I found a new take on it! The version on Instructables uses a breadboard, wires, and other electrical components. It’s designed to teach children the basics of breadboarding — and to have fun, of course!
Setting Up a LAMP Server
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.
Plasma Arc Microphones
In a previous post, I talked about how plasma can be used to build high-fidelity speakers. Plasma isn’t limited to only producing sound– it can also be used to record it. Being made up of physical particles, plasma can be affected by vibrations through the air. This means it is possible to build a plasma arc microphone using the proper circuit. This application is far less common than using a plasma arc for a speaker, but research has still been done on the subject.