Digilent Digital Discovery Review

s2000gt

9 Oct 2017

[Posted as blog entry due to RoadTest form submission issue]

When I first saw this, I thought, is this just another cheap Saleae Logic knockoff.

Well not even close.The numbers don't lie.

Saleae 8/16 Pro $479/$599

4 channels @ 500 MS/s

Digilent Digital Discovery $250

8 channels @ 800 MS/s (with HS adapter)

(number of active channels at highest sampling rate)

With the High Speed adapter this unit has some real capability at a price point that can't be touched.

Still the Saleae has been the leading mini format analyzer for so long, only fair to make some comparisons.

Both are based on the Spartan-6 FPGA.

And while Saleae may have a slightly more 'polished' software interface, Digilents Waveforms interface is very easy to use and frequently updated with new features.

With a few more added bus analyzers, Saleae could find themselves easily surpassed by this new addition to the Digilent line of logic products.

Top Comments

m.yasser over 7 years ago

One very nice feature of the Saleae Logic Pro 8/16 is it can read analog signals on all of its channels side by side with digital signals. I found this very handy to verify the signal's voltage level as well as its logic state. This feature provided me with a deep insights on the power integrity of the analyzed signals.
Thanks
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s2000gt over 7 years ago in reply to Jan Cumps

I used I2C and SPI in the Logic Analyser on a microcontroller board i had at the 800MS/s sample rate.

Also tried the Protocol Analyser with I2C on a Digilent PMOD sensor module.
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Jan Cumps over 7 years ago in reply to hlipka

That's fine. Triggering is a win, but plain protocol analysis and showing captured traffic is really useful on its own too.

My analyser can't trigger on any protocol - only render traffic content. So while developing, I usually use a GPIO line as debug trigger in my code.
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hlipka over 7 years ago in reply to Jan Cumps

As protocol analysers, there are SPI, I2C and UART. In the logic analyzer, there are also CAN, I2S, OneWire and custom defined protocols. The latter ones cannot be used for triggering, its just for showing calculates values from specific signals.
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Jan Cumps over 7 years ago

Thanks for the review. What bus analysers did you try?
I'm using a Spartan-6 based analyser that doesn't have CAN protocol support. Interested to see which ones you found useful on the Digilent Discovery.
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