Which are the favorite RoadTested Products of 2021?
Year in Review 2021
In 2021 the element14 community roadtested plenty of new and different kinds of products, including test equipment to FPGA kits to Edge processors, and many more. Given many of us were still in a pandemic/remote work mode, I think the year was a great success and opened new doors for the roadtest program. I'd like to thank everyone who participated.
I like to do an annual poll on the favorite roadtested products for a year. I've been the Roadtest Program Manager for five years and every year is a surprise. Some years are all IoT, while others are single board computer. This year was a toss up between FPGAs and test equipment. I created a poll and asked the community for their favorite roadtested products of 2021.
First Place: Rohde & Schwarz NGU401 Source Measure Unit
This was the first time we roadtested a source measure unit. For some members, I think it was a great introduction to the capabilities of this test equipment. The NGU401 is a four-quadrant R&S®NGU401 source measure unit provides up to 60 W of output power and sink power. The channels are floating, galvanically isolated and protected against overload and short circuits. With six measurement ranges for current and a resolution of up to 6½ digits when measuring voltage, current and power, the R&S®NGU source measure units are perfect for characterizing devices that work from extremely low-power consumption to high currents in the ampere range. Using ammeters with feedback-amplifier technology increases accuracy and widens the sensitivity down to the nA range. With an acquisition rate of up to 500,000 samples per second, even extremely fast variations in voltage or current can be captured. A special ammeter design is used to precisely measure current drains from nA to A in one pass – no need to make multiple measurement sweeps. The instrument's short recovery times enables it to handle fast load changes that occur, for example, when mobile communications devices switch from sleep mode to transmit mode. With high speed data acquisition, every detail is detected down to 2 μs resolution.
Second Place: Digilent 1x1 USB Software-Defined Radio Platform
Software-defined radio is a popular topic with members of the element14 community, so I should not not have been surprised that this product was a favorite. The USRP B205mini-i is a flexible and compact platform that is ideal for both hobbyist and OEM applications. It is designed by Ettus Research and provides a wide frequency range (70 MHz to 6 GHz) and a user-programmable, industrial-grade Xilinx Spartan-6 XC6SLX150 FPGA. The RF front end uses the Analog Devices AD9364 RFIC transceiver with 56 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The board is bus-powered by a high-speed USB 3.0 connection for streaming data to the host computer. The USRP B205mini-i also includes connectors for GPIO, JTAG, and synchronization with a 10 MHz clock reference or PPS time reference input signal. The hardware is conveniently accessible through the USRP Hardware Driver (UHD). UHD provides both a C/C++ and Python API that supports all USRP products and enables users to efficiently develop applications then seamlessly transition designs between platforms as requirements expand. UHD also offers cross-platform support for multiple industry standard development environments and frameworks, including RFNoC, LabVIEW, and Matlab/Simulink. To ensure you have no restrictions on how you use UHD, it is available on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
Third Place: Raspberry Pi Pico
The Raspberry Pi has long been a favorite on the element14 community. This is another great addition to the Pi ecosystem. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a low cost, high performance microcontroller board built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip. The Pico features flexible digital interfaces and can be easily programmed over USB using C/C++ or MicroPython, thanks to a comprehensive SDK with software examples and full documentation.
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