When perusing our site, you’ve probably noticed the section entitled programming solutions, or looked through our FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards and seen the acronym JTAG (Joint Test Action Group). …
A little while ago, you likely saw the post that I did on my Color Invaders project. It’s a lot of fun to play as is, but it was suggested that the game could be made even better if there were some sound effects included as well. I got it done with a few tweaks…
Digilent Adept is a light-weight program that allows users to quickly load .bit files onto your FPGA chip. The Power of Adept is in its simplicity and speed.
Implementation of an instruction pipeline is a common technique used when working with microprocessors. Pipelining improves operation and processing time. Microprocessors such as the Microchip® PIC32MX460F512L on the chipKIT Pro MX4 board use this technology to provide efficient processing and instruction execution. Though the process is sophisticated, it is actually quite simple in concept. In my explanation of instruction pipelines, I’ll specifically refer to the Microchip PIC32 microprocessor.
Earlier today, Josh (a fellow intern and blog contributor) wrote a blog post about logic gates. After reading through Josh’s post and gaining an understanding of the concepts and basic functions of those gates, I figured now would be the perfect time to learn some code. I am going to go over each logic gate and it’s code in Verilog (a hardware language), VHDL (another hardware language) and C (software language).
The very basis of computers is binary. In electronics everything can be boiled down to 1s and 0s. Logic gates are digital circuits that take one or more binary inputs and produce a binary output. You can check out the basis of logic with Boolean Algebra.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ever wonder why oscilloscopes require bulky BNC cables with those fancy switches, while multimeters seem content with plain wires? The key lies in how these instruments handle electronic measurements. One …
Digilent has partnered with CircuitBread to create high-quality electrical engineering lessons on the topic of DC Circuits. Utilizing Digilent’s resources and engineers in conjunction with CircuitBread’s experience in educational content, …
A software-defined radio (SDR) is not a radio in the traditional sense. Instead of fixed analog components with limited range and ability, an SDR is programmable and highly flexible. Referred …
The release of the Raspberry Pi 5 marks another significant milestone in the evolution of single-board computing. With the introduction of a new product, there is often notable enthusiasm surrounding …