How-To Guides and Technical Workflows – Digilent Blog

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?

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.

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.

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.