Lessons for kids?

[JohnBee]

We've been deliberating what projects to implement in our homeschool classes to make good use of the our Discovery 2 kit. And I began to wonder if there were any walk-through type exercises that our children could follow and learn on electrical circuits using diligent products? 

PS. our children range from ages 7 - 17 

 

[jpeyron]

Hi @JohnBee,

The only lessons we have are Here which is a link to our Real Analog - Circuits 1 which does a good job of explaining circuits and lab work. Unfortunately this is geared towards late high school to college aged people. Here is the resource page for the Analog Discovery 2  which has some tutorials and example projects. Here is the resource page for the software Waveforms 2015.  You might be able to find some useful projects on the Digilent Makerspace Blog as well here. 

thank you,

Jon

[Gau_Veldt]

On 3/24/2017 at 1:16 PM, JohnBee said:

We've been deliberating what projects to implement in our homeschool classes to make good use of the our Discovery 2 kit. And I began to wonder if there were any walk-through type exercises that our children could follow and learn on electrical circuits using diligent products? 

PS. our children range from ages 7 - 17 

 

Short answer:

If there is a Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) server that will interact between the Discovery 2 and Scratch, GET IT!

It means you could plug any sort of hardware (like a temperature sensor or an IR sensor) that generates readings into the Discovery and have it send that information to the Scratch project meaning a character would be able react (say having a sprite's face go red with increasing temperature) to a signal or waveform sensed at the Discovery.

This gets even more interactive if the kids make their own hardware that sends data into the Discovery (think robots).

 

Longer answer:

I'm going to take it you mean the Discovery 2 "Maker Bundle" (that has the breadboard and accessories and stuff in it).  This would have similarities to Canakit's Rasberry Pi 3 "Ultimate Bundle" that includes a GPIO breakout and breadboard, jumpers and some LEDs and stuff.  I'm going to be cobbling some wires up on the breadboard to exchange data between the Pi and the standard (connector JE, resistor-protected, unpaired) PMOD port.  I've done some PWM stuff on the Zybo side at the PL to get warmed up and ensure my PMOD port jumpers are all in order.  The Pi will basically be doing something similar what the Discovery 2 does: monitoring signals transferred over the PMOD and dumping them to a visual log (ie: waveform charts) for debugging FPGA designs.

I've tried using the Vivado debug core but it fails to compile every time I try to add its IP so I've given up on that for now and will use the Pi instead.  It does mean I do need a sort of mini-debug FSM coded in HDL to speak SPI over the PMOD so the Pi can ask for signal lines and the PL (as slave) will send data for the currently chosen signal(s).  When making retro computers in HDL there may be a rather high number of signals to monitor, it may not be known which are needed, milliseconds take hours in simulation and the simulator does not always accurately reflect the situation on the running hardware even when using implementation-level simulation.

 

The real joy for a younger learner with a setup like mine would be activating the Pi's GPIO server for Scratch and interacting between a PL design loaded into the Zybo and a Scratch project.  All sorts of possibilities and adventures await.