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I must admit this surprises me a little bit. I work for a large engineering company and very often promote the digital discovery. The thing is that most colleagues react with 'ok, another logic analyzer, boring' I spend a lot of time explaining it is so much more than that. But you know how it works, they stick to the bulky devices they know and use large waveform generators to even generate the most basic signals. For some reason they just don't believe a $200 device with a USB connector can do the same and much much more. Often custom test setups are created to analyze SPI or I2c chips which the discovery can do 'out of the box'. I think that the digital discovery is not positioned right from a commercial perspective. It is so much more than a logic analyzer....... Two flaws corrected and the device is perfect, no with a capital P, Perfect. Most important, the threshold voltage. This must be adjustable for the device to play in the premiere league. Second, a more flexible trigger system with combinations of the basic trigger facilities. A new version offering this would be so welcome and make the device Perfect

When pressing the Order field in the window below the edit window is closed. Think it also happens for some other fields.

Hello Attila, Thanks for your reply, I know, the documentation for the Digital Discovery says: threshold voltage is about 0.45*VCCIO_PROG which correspond to the values mentioned in my first post. Still for the ADP3450 the threshold value when using 3V3 is 1V3 which is not the same as for the Digital Discovery. Because of this the logic analyzer in the ADP3450 is more sensitive to crosstalk induced glitches. My question is whether the threshold voltage can be made such that it can be set independent from the VIO voltage. So when using a VIO of 3V3, it would be very nice to be allowed to set the threshold voltage over the entire range from 0V to 3V3. Most competing products offer this to adjust to the environment under test.

As you can imagine, Digilent equipment is often used in noisy test environments. Often these environments are sensitive to crosstalk, especially on the wires to the test equipment. Especially when multiple lines change their logical level at the same moment, this easily leads to crosstalk on other lines influencing the stability of the (digital) measurement. To (partly) deal with this it would be very helpful if the threshold voltage was adjustable. Working in a 3V3 environment setting the threshold to 1V8 or sometimes even 2V solves many of the crosstalk issues influencing the measurement. So my question is, is it possible to make the threshold adjustable since now it is fixed, depending on the voltage level used. Also I found that working at 3V3, the threshold for the Digital Discovery is 1V42 while for the ADP3450 this is 1V3. At least for different equipment the threshold value should be the same where 1V3 is quite low.

Sometimes I see surveys about certain aspects of the different features offered by the Digilent Equipment. I notice that most of them focus on all analog capabilities. Of course important, but one of the instruments I personally value most is the Logic Analyzer. For the Logic Analyzer I would like to suggest to enhance the trigger capabilities. Currently these are quite limited. What I am really missing are combinations of events leading to a trigger. What I am thinking of are trigger capabilities like: Signal A is high for a certain amount of time followed by a specific edge on signal B. Signal A occurs n times followed by a specific value on a bus. ... I think certain conditions can be created using the ROM logic in the pattern generator but to my knowledge using this feature will not allow to also use time or counting as part of the conditional triggering. As an example of advanced triggering capabilities, below I share the setup dialog of a competing logic analyzer which offers these advanced trigger capabilities. This dialog is quite self explanatory. Two trigger events can be defined where relations between these events can be setup to lead to the 'final' trigger. Adding more advanced trigger capabilities would make the Logic Analyzer much more usable for me and I am curious what other users and the Digilent development team think of this.

I was using Waveforms 3.19.15. After installing 3.19.22 my Digital Discovery was no longer recognized. Uninstalled and re-installed 3.19.15 and everything was fine again. Tried installing 3.19.16, same problem. No recognition of Digital Discovery. Back to 3.19.15 and everything fine again. Starting with 3.19.16 some changed Microsoft software seems to be installed but from 3.19.16 upward I am having this issue. I always install to a custom directory which forces me to uninstall the current version before installing a new version.

I created this. Perhaps this can give you some inspiration.... On the outer holes vertical pin headers are soldered and the whole thing is mounted in a metal frame where the pin headers come through. I don't like the horizontal cables either. The PCB also contains two LED's for the transmit and receive indication of an USB-UART dongle connected to this board.

My occupation is embedded software development especially for micro-controllers, preferably the ARM Cortex-M type. I was annoyed by two things, first the mess on my desk, boards, programmers, wires, power supplies, measurement devices and so on. Second the fact that working from multiple places, the office, home, a client was very problematic since the development equipment was hard to move..... I decided to integrate it all........ and this is the result: A metal portable frame where the development boards are attached using magnetic feet. On the top left connections to a Digilent Digital Discovery, Next to it two USB ports, To the right of that three power outlets for 5V, 12V and 24V And finally a trigger output for my ADP3450 which I can connect to one of the pins of the Digital Discovery On the right a connection for a J-Link programmer and a connector for a second logic analyzer, a LogicPort which I like for its flexible trigger capabilities And this is how the bottom looks: Everything is here. Most important, in the top left corner the Digital Discovery, more about this later. There is a 7 port USB Hub, a UART Dongle, a power supply, a DC-DC converter for powering the USB hub, the LogicPort and the J-Link. And this is what I did with the Digital Discovery: First designed a PCB: Next dismantled the Digital Discovery and using pin headers soldered it to the PCB And finally mounted it in the development frame The feet of the frame are magnetic and I can just click it in a Pelicase for transportation. Just wanted to share this with you all

If I did not experience this myself, I would not believe it. This is what support means, great Attila, fixed it works. Thanks very much, as always, issues are not the thing but how a company deals with them. This can not be done better.

When using the Waveforms patterns tool, waveforms crashes when moving the mouse in field showing the pattern generated. See the picture below. Configuring at least one signal, the right side of the window shows a sample of the pattern generated (marked with the blue rectangle). As soon as the mouse is moved to this area, Waveforms crashes. Configuring multiple signals, the area is larger and the same happens. Can anyone confirm this? Using Windows 10 and the latest version of Waveforms with an ADP3450.

It happened again, was using two scope channels, triggering on SPI traffic. The SPI frequency is 2MHz and it was reported as 3MHz. The signals on the analog channels were off likewise. Looked at the device status and everything was reported fine. Switched the device (ADP3450) off, waited for a few seconds and restarted it. After this, using the same DUT everything was fine. The DUT has not been reset and just remained running while the ADP3450 was reset. Before this happened I have been configuring Ethernet access which I could not get working. Connecting to my router and using the routers DNS, an IP address was handed out to the ADP3450. The manual said to reboot and the device should make a clicking sound. This sound was not heard and only USB access was reported in the device manager. Don't know if this can have anything to do with the mentioned timing issue but feel like mentioning it does not hurt.

Is there any chance WaveForms will be extended with advanced trigger capabilities? Combinations of trigger events would be much appreciated like - Edge occurs followed by specified pin(s) state within a specified time or after a specified time or within a time window - The same when for instance a specific I2C address occurs after one or more other specified events like edges, state and so on Such trigger capabilities are very useful for detecting errors which is not possible with the current trigger capabilities

Hello Attila, thanks for your answer, I have been playing around with the ROM logic and must admit this offers great possibilities. I understand how this can be used for triggering. Regarding the Advanced trigger you mention I am a little lost, having a look at the SDK manual I could not find the required information. Would it be possible for you to give me a hint how to activate the dialog you mention?

I am a very satisfied user of Waveforms , using both an ADP3450 and a Digital Explorer. What I do however mis are more flexible trigger capabilities for the logic analyser instrument. Perhaps I am overlooking something which is the reason for this post: What I mis is the combination of different trigger possibilities to create combined, more complex triggers. I have made quite extensive use of the Intronix LogicPort logic analyzer and to illustrate what I mis below below I show the trigger setup dialogs from this tool. As shown, two triggers can be defined, A and B, which can be combined in different ways. For instance trigger when a signal or group of signals has a defined value (0 or 1) for a specified time or in a specified time window, followed by a rising or falling edges on other signals. The flexible possibilities are illustrated by this dialog and it would be very helpful would Waveforms also offer such possibilities.

Thanks for the reply, no, I never touched this dialog, always use the default internal clock. I remember to have it seen before, this was during a recording session of the logic analyzer. Payed no attention to it then. Will keep my eye open and pay more attention when it happens again. Could it have to do with PLL's not being locked?

The other day I had the following situation: I was monitoring an 8MHz signal which was reported by the ADP3450 as 13.333MHz. This was both on the logic analyzer and on the scope. Since I was convinced the signal was 8MHz, I checked with a different logic analyzer which correctly reported the expected 8MHz. Continuing the next day (after a power cycle) the ADP3450 reported the correct 8MHz. Is this behaviour observed by anyone else or does somebody have a clue what could be causing this behaviour?

As a user of the ADP3450 I take the freedom to provide some information which is think highlight some of the important differences, let anyone correct me if I am wrong: For analogue, the ADP3450 has 14 bit ADC converters which is much more accurate The number of AWG channels is two, while the Picoscope has one Especially at digital level, the ADP3450 is much more powerful: The ADP3450 can generate lots of different digital signals on its 16 IO lines while the Picoscope can only be used as logic analyzer The ADP3450 can be used to test SPI, I2C, CAN etc chips directly, just connect the chip and generate the required protocol to see how the chip reacts The ADP3450 can be used to emulate LED's, switches and sliders to connect to your system instead of physical switches or LED's There are to my opinion also downsides compared to Picoscope, the buffer size is much smaller, especially for the Logic Analyzer the buffer is 32K samples which I consider too small. When observing low frequency signals mixed with high frequency signals, the ADP3450 buffer is too small to be really useful Picoscope uses USB3 and I am a little disappointed the AD3450 does not.

Is there any chance upcoming Digilent Devices use USB3?

To add to this post, I have been using the ADP3450 for a couple of weeks now, mainly digital and think as far as all-in-one testing is concerned this is a really great device. It offers much more than the logic analyser I have been using before, besides the logic analyser, being able also to generate digital signals is a thing I like a lot. There are however some things I am missing and would like to see in a future device. The sampling rate and the buffer for the logic analyser are quite small and it would be a great improvement if these were enhanced. As far as I understand Digilent has the design readily available when I look at the specs of the Digital Discovery. Also the number of signal pins could be enhanced, using the DIO connector both for input and output, only having 16 of them is a little limiting. Related to this, perhaps sample compression is an option to have a look at. I have been using a Logicport analyser for the past few years and this device only has a 2K sample buffer but still is very usable since only the changes in the signals are stored and counted. This device can hold 1K transitions in its 2K buffer and I found this to be very useful. Would really love to see a future device offering these enhancements, something like the ADP3450++?

As a user of an ADP3450 I need to make some cables to connect the digital I/O of the device to different pieces of development hardware. Unfortunately the 24 pin flywire cable is not available separately at Digilent. The standard flat cable headers I have in stock do not fit. Also I was not able to find them on the internet. Most headers are much wider. Can someone please tell me the type and brand of those headers and where they can be obtained. When possible and the information is available, please distributors that can deliver to The Netherlands.