Welcome back to the Digilent Blog!
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. So I decided to write this post to help first-time Digilent Forum users get the best experience out of the Digilent Forum.
The Forum itself is organized into three main categories: News, Digilent Technical Forums, and General Discussion. The News category is limited to forum announcements and for new users to introduce themselves (but not to ask questions).
Questions may be asked in one of the subcategories of the Digilent Technical Forum. Each subcategory is based on a platform type such as FGPA or Add-on Boards. The largest subcategory, FPGAs, also has its own subcategory called Embedded Linux. This is a place where you can ask questions about getting the Linux operating system up and running on any of our boards such as the ZYBO.
The last major section of the Forum is the General Discussion section. Here, you can share some of the projects you have made, offer suggestions for improving the Forum, and other non-technical questions.
If you just want to know if a particular question has been answered, you can browse through the entire Forum as a guest to view all of the topics and responses that have been posted. Otherwise, if you have a question of your own or (even better) can answer a question that was posted by someone else, you’ll need to either sign-up or sign in via the buttons in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. All you need to sign-up is a username, a password, and an email address. You will need to verify the email address so we can confirm that you are not a spam-bot. After your account has been created, you’ll be able to post topics and responses.
A team of people at Digilent is working to help address and moderate any questions that come up on the Forum, so you shouldn’t have to wait too long before receiving a response of some kind. But how can you make sure that your question is answered in an efficient manner? The biggest thing is to make sure that your post is clear about what you are asking. What I tend to do is post what board I’m working with, what issue I am currently experiencing, and what I did up to that point. An example question from one of our users on the Forum is provided below:
Granted, there are going to be times where you simply don’t know what’s wrong or what you did — you just know that it’s not working. In that case just ask what you can and we’ll do our best to work with you and help pinpoint the issue at hand. Feel free to check out our Forum if you haven’t yet!
