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.
One of the companies we work closely with is Xilinx, and we’re honored that they feature some of our products on their partner pages. The Digilent partner page not only has information about our company, but links to our products that use a Xilinx FPGA (and a few accessories).
Do Fridays ever have a whimsical feel? They do for us, so we thought we’d do a short retrospective on our fantastic mascot, Turbo.
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?
Guest contributor Kursat Gol provides a review of his project testing the NetFPGA-1G-CML with a laptop computer.
We hope you had a great weekend, even though we’re sad it’s over! Want to end those Monday blues and work on a fun FPGA project? Take a leaf out of Instructable …
You’ll often hear about the “Linux kernel”, but what does that mean? Today we’re going to go about explaining what the Linux kernel is in terms that people can understand.
What are some of the communication protocols commonly used in Digilent Pmods? Find out by watching our latest video, featuring James Colvin.
While Digilent’s YouTube channel now has x videos, but it wasn’t always that way. Back in 2010, we did our first YouTube video. It’s part of the Real Analog Course by Tim Hanshaw, and it’s incredibly fun to see how much has changed in five years!
On May 1, our forum was offline for a major version update of our forum software. You probably noticed that the site looks very different than it did before! The upgrade went smoothly and we are excited to share the new features with you.
In one of my first circuits courses, the professor’s favorite words of advice were to “keep calm and remember KCL, KVL, and Ohm’s law.” With these three concepts, just about any electrical circuit can be analyzed and understood. Granted, things get a little more complicated when you add concepts like inductance and capacitance, but KCL, KVL, and Ohm’s law form the foundation of all circuit analysis. Brandon mentioned Ohm’s law in his blog post on how to choose a resistor for your design, so I will only be discussing KCL and KVL.
What are some more things to do with an FPGA? One Instructables user, krosenfeld7, made a guide for an FPGA composer.
We’ve talked a lot lately about the Nexys 4 DDR lately, and we definitely hope you like it as much as we do here at Digilent. But what are the roots of this awesome board?
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. …
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 …
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.
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.)
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!
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 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.
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.
You’re probably familiar with our chipKIT Pro MX7 and MX4 by now. But how did this line of microcontrollers get its start?
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!
