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  • Author Author: dougw
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Analog Discovery Teaser

dougw

Intro

I was selected to road test a Digilent Analog Discovery 3,  and the kit has arrived. I will post a couple of blogs as I learn a bit about this instrument before diving in to do the actual road test.

The Analog Discovery 3 is a brilliant design that marries analog output channels and analog input channels with some great software to achieve some powerful capabilities. Not only can it perform the functions of many individual instruments, it can integrate these functions into complete synergistic test and measurement systems.

This blog covers a quick unboxing and some cool arbitrary waveform generator work.

Unboxing

Teaser #1

Here is a teaser image of the 2 channel arbitrary waveform generator feeding the 2 channel oscilloscope of the AD3:

image

The Digilent Waveforms software has some great features - here I have dragged the scope window to a large screen TV.

This device can handle CSV files directly, which makes it easy to generate arbitrary waveforms.

The element14 waveform is inspired by   who has improved his original work here, although I am trying to tweak the concept to get closer to the proper logo colors. I might get even closer in a future episode.

Teaser #2

This image shows an XY plot of e14 on the big screen and the constituent X and Y channels on the little screen. 

image

The X-Y plot clearly shows each point in the arbitrary waveform, which is a little different than a normal X-Y scope, but the big screen combined with the precision of this instrument really show what the signal looks like.

Discussion

The AD3 has an enormous repertoire of functionality and it will take some time to explore its myriad features, but I will post little blogs as I learn interesting applications.

So far I am enjoying the exploration. Not only are there a lot of nifty and useful features, it is actually loads of fun to try and do strange, weird and unusual things that this synergistic combination of hardware and software allow.

I generally don't think of instruments, even good instruments as being fun, but this one qualifies.

Links:

Raster Text on an AD3

AD3 Unboxing

AD3 Enclosure

My Road Test of the Analog Discovery 3

Digilent Analog Discovery 3 road test page

Digilent AD3 page

  • in reply to dougw

    to test the waveform update rate, you can make the triggers an output, and check the output on a separate oscilloscope. I get a few dozen waveforms per second on the AD2, which is good enough for what the device offers, but it would be nice to know if the AD3 has improved on that. not asking for like a complete characterization or anything like that, just to get an idea of how it performs. all AD3 reviews i've seen online only explore waveforms, but never go into what the actual hardware can do, which would be nice to see.

    thanks!

  • in reply to Anthocyanina

    My road test blog will be more of a learning journey than a rigorous certified performance characterization, but I can try to see if I can take some meaningful noise measurements.

    Do you have a suggested method to do update rate measurements? It seems like it would be limited by USB bandwidth (which may be a host computer limitation) and sample rate or buffer size, which are adjustable.

    So far, subjectively, I'm not noticing any lags running on a fairly fast MS Surface.

    I do not have an AD2 to compare to...

  • please do waveform update rate tests and noise floor tests if you can. those are things digilent has kind of avoided mentioning by just going around the questions or being vague. especially a comparison of those things against the AD2 would be welcome. thanks! 

  • Nice looking unit.

    I look forward to seeing what you find out about it.

  • in reply to rsjawale24

    Red Pitaya is an interesting module. I will likely touch on some differences/similarities in the road test. We are seeing the birth or maturing of a whole new instrumentation sector as technology progress enables users to enjoy more comprehensive integrated test and measurement capabilities in ever smaller packages. The shrink has been happening in more specific adjacent and overlapping sectors as well such as SDRs, network analyzers, oscilloscopes and function generators.