EEVblog 1552 - Digilent Analog Discovery 3

hi it's product review time we're going to take a look at the new digilent analog Discovery 3 because you've seen the analog Discovery 2 it's incredibly popular especially with schools and stuff like that could be I don't know if you're I've been out of school for quite some time so uh let me know is this like the de facto standard in schools now um the software is killer for this thing so but wouldn't surprise me uh it has lots of popularity it is uh cheaper if you're a student by the way this is the old analog uh Discovery too this is National instruments Edition I don't think it's any uh different to the regular one but did you let have sent in the new analog Discovery three thank you very much I've had this uh for quite a while now but it was only released like two weeks ago or something I believe so we're going to check it out it is very nice so we get some pin headers we get a bunch of uh pin leads for it and one of the big changes is it's USBC now instead of USB a micro USB so there you go there's our pin out diagram and that's all she wrote Oh for those sticker aficionados like a bought one beautiful so um yeah nice green case don't know if it comes in any more fruity colors but yeah um USB C now five volt R DC they have removed the headphone uh Jack which apparently like you can get like an additional board to plug into it or something if you want the headphone interface I guess they took that out for some reason um and it's just the same exactly the same interface as before except the labels are now on here instead of on top here I don't I like on top they should have duplicated those on top I think yeah it's never here nor there on the bottom it's got nice rubber baby buggy bumpers so yeah so that's an improvement it really doesn't move around much on at least on any static mat like that whereas this one was significantly easier to move around so it's bigger and more better now if we actually go over and take a look we'll link these in we can have a look uh it is 379 Yankee bucks yes it is pricey for what you get I mean like it's basically just an fpga and a big ass 14-bit analog to digital converter and DAC um it's you know it's not 379 dollars worth of Hardware but as you'll see um all the value of this is in most of the value is in the software the waveforms are software so anyway it is Backward Compatible um adjustable system clock now whereas it was 100 megahertz uh before um so now you can adjust it from 50 to 125 that might be useful for some applications um for you know if you're matching sample rates or whatever all all instruments are available in every configuration no more losing access to digital i o so it's basically got a bigger and better fpga in it that allows you to do a lot of extra stuff at the same time whereas before there were limitations now there's lots less limitations Oh No Limit don't know if they're I'm not gonna say there's none but anyway USB uh C I don't think um it gets you any faster throughput I think it's just a USBC interface is it it's got the same 14-bit R resolution differential um analog to digital converter 9 megahertz bandwidth minus three DB uh 0.16 bit resolution sampling a quarter of the system clock maximum sample buffer has doubled from 16 to 32k that's part of the fpga difference and Hardware Hardware fur filters are for each input so it's got Hardware filters now instead of software inputs we might be able to demonstrate that that would be really cool so you can feed your signal in there it can do Hardware filtering and then you can output it straight to the DAC that's uh it's pretty versatile stuff and apparently you can sample it straight in whereas before you had to if you wanted to know what you were outputting you had to use one of the channels to feedback or something like that anyway two single-ended analog outputs plus minus 5 volts 14 bit resolution exactly the same they're doubled that 16 digital I O's are all still the same I think though they have removed the 1.8 volt lvcmos uh though but uh plus five volt minus 5 volt power supplies are um 2.4 watts each but I think you have to use the external uh plug Packy for that and there's a very comprehensive article here written by um James Colvin who's one of the developers of all the apps and the reference things and whatnot so they have actually reduced the price from 399 Yankee bucks to 379 uh bucks and I won't go through but they've basically upgraded from a Spartan 6 fpga to a Spartan seven um inside we'll open it up and we'll have a quick squeeze but there's a whole ton of other stuff that you can do in this new one with the new fpga that you couldn't do in the previous Spartan six so it's basically uh they've lowered the price a little bit and um yeah it's it looks like it can do do some really like really versatile stuff anyway um let's go back to the videotape let's take this apart now while I'm taking these apart let's talk about the price 379 Yankee bucks which seems crazy I think it's about 250 if you're a student or something um that don't quote me on that anyway there is a student discount for that thing now for that sort of price you can buy a proper four Channel desktop scope like you can get get your Rye gold don't know if you can get the sequence that cheap can you but it's pretty close right it's basically the same price as a desktop scope so why would you buy this sort of like dinky looking thing with no real um like front end you know it's got no like doesn't have a proper front end uh in it why would you buy this instead of buying a real bench top scope well and it's only got like nine mag bandwidth there's bandwidth isn't you know 150 Meg 100 Meg or anything like that um why would you buy that not only does it have a dual 14 bit ADC it's also got the uh 14 bit DAC as well so so you can output signals and as we'll see that all the value is in the software this can do a ton of stuff you simply can't do on a benchtop scope but it is no replacement like you shouldn't even compare these two you can't compare this to a bench top Skype it's horses for courses um how do I get this bloody thing on proudly designed by digilit Inc in Romania and the United States of America I think it's made in China though uh secret squirrels screws under there unbelievable all right oh we're in look at this okay that is uh significantly different isn't it oh look at that we've got a big metal oh here we go there we go we've got a big metal can over here that's interesting there you go so there's the new Spartan six if PGA on an angle if a routing or sorry Spartan seven um fpga for routing reasons of course and the previous one is over here there you go it went from a six uh SLX 16 to a Spartan 7 xc7s25 so significant upgrade there I'm not sure of the price difference but they have actually lowered uh the price here so anyway looks like there's our DAC we can call up the specs on that and we've got a TI 36r44 that'd be the 14-bit analog to digital converter there they uh I've been working on this for a while copyright 2022 got some real overexposure uh issues there sorry you can't see the there we go it's turned the iris down a bit and uh there we go we've got two uh relays here on the input their trimmer capsa again um for your input voltage device I think there's only two ranges on this thing from memory and then we've got the input buffer and it's a dual 80s I think it's a dual ADC we'll have a squeeze yes low power dual Channel ADC then we've got our Dax on our output um and it looks like they've got the requisite grounds in here look at the Vias and stuff it looks like they did have look they've thought about putting a metal can on here but they didn't so that's interesting they've got a metal can up here so I assume that's like the switching uh converter up there but they didn't put cans on the analog front end or the ADC so that's rather interesting I guess you know the whole idea is you want to keep the crap from here out of here so let's just put one can on here instead of having three cans that's probably easier it's not much else as an ftdi chip uh here then we've got like as a 1.6 volt voltage Regulators at a 1.0 volt voltage regulator that would be for the fpga cores uh would it so yep um some switching nut converter here you can tell by the inductors you don't even have to look at the chip number and yeah not a huge amount more um not too fussed about that so there you have it and under the can Oh I thought that cam would uh prize off it doesn't looks like it's soldered down yeah I couldn't be bothered getting that um off now um I'm not that fast that'll be the uh DC that'd be the power supply uh section there I would presume and for those curious to see the other side yes it is a double-sided Dart load they couldn't fit at all on the top um even with the bigger board so that'll cost them a bit extra a little bit extra of course to uh make that so that'd be is that your protection for your uh logic and light yeah that looks like protection for your logic analyzer there no workers yes I hit there you have it there's the two of those was that yeah that was a significant double-sided load so yep that is uh More betterer For Less cost has anyone actually cost it out um it did well this one's so new maybe someone hasn't done it yet has anyone actually cost it out the analog guard Discovery 2 or the three for that matter it'd be interesting no at the bomb cost of this thing uh would be in volume but they're making a crap ton of these so yeah the volume's huge so they have it that's a 14-bit 125 Meg sample per second low noise dual patent Channel ADC blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and now Dak is this uh Joby here and it does have an amplifier uh to give I think plus minus five volts output which is quite reasonable ah there's a little light pipe there where did that fall out from I don't see a hole in the case for it to pop out these at the side it's got to be the side somewhere oh yeah oh yeah look at that isn't that cute just fits in there like a OJ glove and for those wondering uh what that does well here's our lead down here and it's a vertical emitter of course the lights coming out out the top of the board and how do you get that out the side well they could have just used a right angle lead but you know hey nastier or whatever like especially like a surface mount version like that so you just use a light pipe and it just takes the vertical and bends it a bit and it comes out the front of the case no workers but that's another part you've got to add to your bill of materials then you've got to engineer it and have it manufactured and everything else so you know adds to the cost I do like how they added a slot to the board down there and that just holds that light pipe in place that's very nice yeah hats off more attention to detail the rubber feet here they've done a curved slot there and that just goes in like that so there's no way that can come off it's not just stuck on they've actually you know put a bit of pride in the design of this thing nice and because the pin out is exactly the same I can reuse uh the breakout board that I've got for the two waveforms and the channel one and channel two doesn't add any extra ability I mean it does have like AC DC uh coupling and this has a 50 ohm output uh termination but apart from that doesn't add any like extra vertical attenuation on the front and you're still limited to the two ranges of uh plus minus two and a half volts to plus minus uh 25 volt uh input ranges on this thing and I think the waveforms are only single uh plus minus five volts out but um anyway with the 14-bit converter it's still pretty Schmick anyway download the latest waveform software it did have to register to do it to get to the download page though that sucks come on seriously um anyway we've got scope wave gen uh Power Supplies uh voltmeter and the power supplies can actually be modulated apparently like slowly modulated they're not like the arbitrary waveform generos but apparently you can slowly modulate so you can do like ramp ups and ramp down sounds and stuff like that great um we will actually see if that's the case uh and then you've got a volt meter you've got a Data Logger as well logic analyzer pattern generator um static I O type stuff you know if you just want to light up some seven segment I think that's the yeah that's the example seven segment display there they've got a spectrum analyzer a network analyzer and they've got an impedance analyzer as well fantastic and they've got a curved Tracer I didn't know I've never played with that before uh protocol analyzer which um what sort of protocols do you get do you art spy I Square C can uh CDC JTAG swd and AVR as well nice and then you can do uh custom scripting as well I've never tried to script this thing so I don't know but apparently it's really good and apparently it integrates with Matlab and because National instruments own it now I think it integrates with national instruments um tools somehow and all that sort of jazz so automation is a pretty high on the list here anyway so we can go to if you just want to get back you can get to welcome so we can go to any of the oh I just heard the relays uh click down in there and we're good to go like it just automatically detected it down here um and can we call that up yep there you go and then we can reset all the stuff internally now I didn't know about this can what the waveform software actually support your sound card really that's fantastic can you just download this for free you've got to register but download it for free and can you turn your sound card into oscilloscope I didn't know that I might have to try that on the I just do like a quick second Channel video and try that out actually if that's the case wow and I don't know what these other products are the e-explorer the eclipse uh the the digital Discovery I've got uh that's a different product Discovery Studio I'm not sure what that is but there's yeah they've got all these different ADP um I don't know so but yeah anyway we've got the analog Discovery three so you can see the difference in the waveform memories and stuff here between the three and the two there you go they are much smaller um so yeah this had apparently they have removed the 1.8 volt digital um input here that's just um yeah that's gonski so these are the different modes that you can actually uh configure you can only select like one of these modes so Discovery three so you gotta you know you've got to pick your poison here what do you want and why would you want to select like a lower memory range like two by four K uh for example um because it faster updating more better updating speed so it's a trade-off between I presume your updating rate and uh your memory depth but that's typical of these types of Scopes which do the capture and then dump the data capture dump the data captured up the data I don't know what settings we're at but I'm just start running this now and as you can see uh we're taking 16k samples at 1.58 uh Meg and that's kind of the uh update rate so can we change this in a real tight night it stops updating when we do that that's a bit of a shame isn't it anyway let's go to the two channel by 4K option shall we for the scope so if we select that no that looks like a similar is that a similar update rate ah 4096 to 4K at 400 kilohertz now so they can't run it at the same clock rate they could before for a given uh time-based setting move my head out of the way here and this is how we control the input here so we can turn off channel two if we want turn off channel one or channel two and uh we can set offsets here the controls are what you expect for a USB scope they're not you know absolutely uh terrific but they do the job so we have a selection between uh two five volts uh per division like this but really um I do believe these are only fixed to input ranges physically on uh the front end so but but they're doing that you know they're giving you the traditional 125 Secret words to make it a familiar scope interface that's nice and there you go if we switch to five millivolts per division you can see well we can stop that okay you can see that yeah it's software magnified like this because we don't have a true five millivolt uh per Division I believe it's like it's just two and a half volts uh like input plus minus two and a half volt input range but you've got to divide that by 14 bits let's get the confuser out here so we've got a 5 Volt range plus minus uh two and a half volts divided by two to the power of 14 uh sixteen thousand uh 384. that gives us uh 305 micro volts per bit so you know it's it's not too shabby so we can actually go down to 200 microvolts per division like this and you can see let's run that again it's hard to sort of see but each one is yeah around about that 300 microvolt uh level there so you know that's a bit how you're doing 200 microvolts I don't even know why they bother like 1M really old is fine it's just you know marketing wankery really anyway let's go into the wave gen let's see what we've got here uh DC sine square triangle ramps uh noise pulse uh trapezium sign power um see scope channel one okay so you can take it from the I don't know what c sharp is there but scope channel one it looks like you can take it from the ADC so it looks like that's looping the channel one ADC and back to the uh DAC output so that's pretty darn flexible and then you can filter from channel one right so we can take an input signal from Channel One filter it and then output it um on the arbitrary wave gen nice and that's done in I believe that's done in the hardware as I said Hardware filter it's done inside the fpga all right I've enabled both channels here so what I'm going to do is feed and generate a signal on the output of channel one so I'm gonna feed up its own clacker here I'm generating a waveform on channel waveform channel one here I'm going to feed that into Channel One ADC the scope input and then we're going to filter that and then we're going to Output that on waveform channel 2 and then read it back on channel 2 of the scope let's see if we can do that I I don't know I haven't tried it yet but I think we can so if we go into Channel 2 of our arbitrary waveform generator and we select the source for that signal as the scope channel one which we're reading in okay from the ADC we can actually read that in and if we do let's let's just do 50 okay so it should actually well no we'll do a hundred percent first okay so we'll go over here and we'll see that they're actually there's two waveforms there right there's there's channel one channel two is identical because channel two is being fed from waveform generator or two which has been fed from analog ADC input channel one which is being fed from the arbitrary waveform generate I can just think of like I can remember when I was studying how useful this would have been like from an in an educational scenario if I was teaching stuff oh my goodness like just the flexibility just with the two channels here the flexibility you can do with this sort of thing is absolutely amazing anyway right so we can do this All in real time so as I said we can set this to like 50 and now our waveform Gen 2 will be 50 of what we sample in with channel one so it should automatically be half yeah there it is half right it's half the amplitude nice and we can offset that by a volt if we want right so let's do that right so it's 50 of the amplitude plus a volt up and is that what we say oh we don't why no oh are we ac coupling or something are we oh yeah I yeah no silly me that's me that's actually my Hardware doing that I you will see I'm I'm AC coupling okay so let me go to DC coupling and this board doesn't come with it by the way I had this for my analog Discovery too so and bingo there it is you get your one volt uh offset nice so can we actually filter stuff like this let's go back in here and let's experiment once again I haven't read the manual with this right so look we can get like an average is this like an average responding let's let's have a let's see if that makes and it shouldn't make any difference no and it doesn't Okay so filter channel one I don't know what filter C4 is what's C4 I'm gonna have to rtfm on that but can we go filter channel one and go whoa whoa that's that's off the scale okay so what is that filter doing what's that c sharp or C hash yeah I don't know what the C hash is like is being programmed in like C sharp or whatever I I don't know what the deal is can we actually sweep the channel coming from the ADC channel one I think we can check it out we can damp it to five percent like we can damp it to a percentage right in like a certain time period like 100 microseconds wow look at that look at that and you'll notice the um the Shaded part in here it looks like we have a uh persistence uh display in there as well that's a nice uh touch so look at like just just think about what's happening here this is the nuts now you can actually um move these vertical you can just grab that with the mouse and just move it as well as like using the offset uh thing over here as well and if you want to select channel one you just go here and then we can just move channel one like that but you'll notice that it is changing because we're actually offsetting Channel One what we're reading in so what we're reading in with channel one is impacting what we're generating on our second Channel arbitrary waveform generator and which then has been read by channel two like how good is this this is just amazing wow so unfortunately I haven't figured out this filter yet um and I don't know why it's got filter C4 I don't know it's C4 means that like Channel 4 there is no channel four right so like filter channel one if we go there and then up run like that okay oh what's what's happening yeah we've just got a massive signal there so let's let's get rid of those and we filter yeah I I'm not sure what's going on there right because all I'm doing like I'm filtering I don't know what the filters actually doing and where you set that up like it's it's not in here so once again like I haven't read the manual this is like my first time playing around with this new analog Discovery 3 and I haven't played with the original one for donkey's years um so yeah please forgive me but you can see like the amazing capabilities I've made this do in just minutes of just plugging it in and as far as the help goes look it's uh it's all built in so if we do but hopefully if we do want to find out actually it'd be nice if I could like right click on that and like call up you know and say I want help on that like what is that like what is that feature it'd be nice if like that would if there was a button next to everything that automatically hyperlinked you over to the various help but you know I mean it's fantastic as it is but yeah that just would have been a nice touch but anyway I wonder if it's in here oh and it's got an editor for your arbitrary waveform shapes as well once again like I won't go in and play with that but like that's just like Siri like look look input tables of stuff in there oh goodness oh wow custom math functions and things like that and just generate let it generate our way as well as importing like existing things and presumably let you save the ADC and then you can import that you know you can modify it elsewhere and then you can bring it back in but wow just the like the customization the of the arbitrary waveform generates compile and combined with the adcs this is incredible now unfortunately the help doesn't tell you anything about those extra types like yeah it just doesn't tell you about these extra types here so that's a little bit disappointing but you know and like I'll I'll eventually figure that out but just not for this video and let's go to the power supply over here and see what we've got here we go positive and negative uh Supply this would all be that stuff under the can in there that we saw it got an internal temperature sensor that's the die on the fpga so that's run at UH 60 almost 64 degrees there Fahrenheit for you Yanks um USB voltage 4.7 so I'm just powering this from a USB 2. by the way I'm not powering it from like a USB um C or USB 3. so is that how much current it's actually take is its own current consumption so there's not much left over on that pool what is it one amp port or something so there's not much left over to power our products so that's why it has an external 5 volt Jack on it so then you can actually Supply the more output voltage there but anyway um positive Supply well it looks like it's already on there you go so we can just use that bar or can we type in you betcha or we can set maximums too so that we don't accidentally you know damage our circuitry if you've got you know a three volt circuitry you don't want to accidentally you know slide that bar all the way with LBJ right over to five volts and then blow up your bloody you know your expensive widget so yeah that's that's pretty cool oh and we can have a tracking power supply too nice master enable is off how about we turn master enable on there we go Hardware power limit okay and then we can set a power limit as well so you can go up to 15 watts here wow okay yeah but of course I don't don't know if you can do that from the USBC suppliers analog Discovery three see power supplies for more information so yeah it looks like it does have extensive fusing um inside here so you shouldn't be able to blow up your USB it should uh and electronic fuse in there nice you should be able to actually limit that um but if you want the full power of course you know the 15 watts I don't think uh you might not be able to do that over the US USB but Aha and the USB port there you go the USB will only go to 5.5 Watts uh total so if you want um higher power than that you'll have to use the auxiliary uh five volts there up to a 15 absolute Max well it does say down here uh anything over 10 watts your risk uh thermal shutting down but it's got lots of protections built in nice you need that especially in a school environment I think we just turn on crazy stuff like a 3D spectrogram for example like that's nuts right we can just we can bring that up all right we can make that bigger look it's just like seriously great stuff right this thing just as I said I could go for hours and hours and hours doing a video showing you every single feature of this thing I can't possibly cover it all and all the combinations of all the different things you can do ice cart and persistence and then we've got eye diagrams right we've got histograms we've got spectrograms we've got ffts of course um you know that's a given um and then you've got measurements and then we've got login and then we've got uh counter is that just a frequency counter thing then we've got audio function stop it I can't handle it too many features okay let's see if we can ramp our power supplies shall we in our waveform gen here we can not only waveform one waveform two but we can actually use the wave gen to control the power supplies now I believe you could do this in the analog Discovery too although I haven't tried it but you had to choose a certain mode now you can just do it freely in in any mode you want so let's choose the positive voltage rail here okay and bingo we now have the ability to I don't know why that didn't change at all didn't change to an arrow didn't want to go full screen there how do I get back like you can have these on separate screens which is really cool for multi-monitor setups but like I can I can dock this back but I don't know how to get back to like having the split screen hang on options instrument Windows tabbed separate docking docking mode there you go got it you just go into settings there Beauty Bobby does look at that so what's our maximum frequency here for our power supply 2.5 Hertz yeah that's not surprising because when you want to characterize and simulate your power supplies ramping on they typically ramp on in terms of milliseconds hundreds of milliseconds even microseconds um so yeah so there you go down to one micro Hertz or you can just have DC anyway so let's ramp up at a rate of one Hertz period one second amplitude uh it's okay let's go from zero to one volt and uh 2.5 volts offset well we don't want any offset do we and we don't want sinusoid all what we want is a ramp up there you go so we what they've already they've put that in there for us awesome so we want it to ramp up so now we want a single shot capture on our scope our voltage ramp now I've got to tie the m inputs so that we can use our channel one to measure our power supply yeah here's where I would have preferred those silk screen on the top here so our Channel One the orange one we want to connect through to our V plus there and because this is a differential input input remember we've got uh one minus as well we should have to connect the grounds together as well of course this is not going to be a common ground scope but it is not isolated don't think that this is isolated from the USB um I've done a video how not to blow up your oscilloscope you still could come a gutter okay there we go we've got our differential across our power supply let's go so there you go we are pulsing at one Hertz there but it looks like it's we're going to need a load on that because it's not going all the way down to zero so where our offset is zero our amplitude's one volt but yeah our power supply is it is ramping and watch what happens I'm going to disconnect the ground there just to show you it's not not a common ground Bingo oops oops we're just I'm touching my finger on that so we're getting our 50 hertz main sum on there okay so there you go that's the differential input of the scope but I won't go into the difference between single ended and differential there we go I just put a random resistor across here and you can see the perfect ramp up and then we're going to discharge because the discharge into the resistive load is the discharge of the capacitor so that's going to be a capacitor discharge curve but you can see yeah it ramps up it ramps up perfectly isn't that great and it's a half second ramp up because it's a one Hertz period we can change that change that to two and a half Hertz but there you go oh silly me I um thought we could do fast ramp up no of course we can't two and a half Hertz is the absolute maximum we can do so it's only going to get slower right so we can ramp up over 10 seconds here it goes over 10 seconds right so this is not really the tool to use if you want to like simulate like 50 microsecond turn on you really need a professional tool for that but still it's handy to do ramp on it'd be nice if it was a bit faster but that's the limitations of I don't know the hardware in this thing it can't go any quicker but that's pretty cool huh we can actually ramp up our power supplies that's got to be handy for certain applications so that's a very useful feature but unfortunately not as useful as it could be for like real proper simulation of ramping up of your fast power supplies because you want to test your you know most as I said milliseconds hundreds of milliseconds ramp up uh kind of thing this thing's not going to do that it's only going to do that this thing's only going to do uh 400 milliseconds absolute uh minimum uh ramp up time so it's got to be faster than 400 milliseconds unfortunately but still um yeah oh we don't have to do ramp up like we can do a ramp down so you can actually simulate your let's try that shall we there's our ramp up and there's our ramp down so if we actually stop that and we zoom in how fast is that bad boy ramping up that's just the that's not the software doing that that's just the power supply telling it to go to another voltage and whoop as fast as the loop um of your of the internal power supply in this thing can actually goes I don't like the fact that when you like uh zoom in on this thing right it gives you a Vernier but then it gives you like an odd scale at the bottom you know you just get like a Vernier scale at the bottom like 0.906 seconds and 1.06 that like it's just yeah can you like snap it to the like you know nearest one or something that'd be nice anyway we can add uh we can turn on cursors here and if you want to add cursors we can actually uh go well you've got to actually add a Delta actually so we need to get rid of that and and it's not going to automatically give us 2 which is a little bit confusing so we need another Delta one and boom we need to snap that in there like that and we can measure our ramp on Tire ramp up time but now they will track like that so there you go um 7.5 milliseconds uh ramp on time that's you know typical for a hardware power supply which is what you get in here unfortunately you can't control that it's just as fast it just ramps on as fast as it can yeah if you want to turn on a lot of like stuff at once you really do need a multi-monitor uh configuration you know to Branch everything out I'm not turning on a whole bunch of stuff it's just this is crazy the amount of stuff this can do and check this out this could be worth its weight in gold to a lot of people right I've Got The Power once again the power supply we can do creative things with the power supply we can generate right I'm just generating 3.3 volts and here it is up here right it's measuring it live 3.3 uh volts DC but we can actually add noise on top of that power supply so we can go one volt right well we're adding like random one volt noise at two and a half Hertz right so let's just add in right just random noise that's just ridiculous right or let's make it a bit better right let's go up to one kilohertz look like one one kilohertz is the maximum but check it out we've added one volt noise I assume that's amplitude that's Peak to Peak is it it doesn't actually tell you you can actually set the your Peak there you go so you can actually set units here all right so you can set Peak to Peak so if we wanted RMS there we go it adds a little RMS symbol oh so amazing right so we can add one volt RMS one kilohertz noise like unfortunately doesn't have infinite capability we can't like put on like one 100 kilohertz switching noise or something like that right between that one kilohertz right effectively one kilohertz switching noise here and I like it to our 3.3 volt power supply are you kidding me like that's just amazing so if we want to say 50 millivolts RMS noise on there there it is we just added our 50 millivolts RMS noise and we can do any of these functions okay up to a certain you know frequency limits and stuff like that and we can even we can even modulate the power supply based on what we read for our analog input oh what you can feed it back up its own clacker this is just ridiculous and then we can once again I haven't figured out this Hardware filters or whatever but I go all right I've got my power supply on below me here unfortunately we're not reading with the ADC at the moment so I'm just going to short that out so oops yep there we go there's our there's our current limit you can see that coming on red so no workers it's limiting that we're not it's not like shutting down our USB uh Supply or anything so let's do the same on five volts yep we can just yeah short that no problems and it's still it's all being powered from the USB like this is just a USB 2 uh Supply no workers and if I change it to plus minus uh five volts there I like how it actually reads it actual reads the actual voltage back and we'll see that actually drop uh like that and uh the negative rail hasn't uh dropped but it is limiting uh that as well you can see the USB current increased from 692 that's the supply of the analog Discovery and then yeah we don't have much to play with and then it's gone up to 800 um there for uh when I short the thing so it doesn't have much current to play with and it would have been you know absolutely fantastic if it had like a proper power supply capability with current like adjustable Uh current limiting and stuff like that but it looks like it doesn't actually like you can limit like the hardware power limit but it's not like you know you can set up like a constant current uh Supply or anything like that by the looks of it and let's plug in an external 5 volt power supply auxiliary voltage no it's not there oh I just plugged in an external five volt power supply and something popped up don't know what that was can I do that again hey I've disconnected the five odd Supply and it's still showing down below that there's five volt aux let me short out the power supply 4.6 volts that's interesting is that a bug it's still showing auxiliary current I am not plugging in any auxiliary Supply voltage let me plug it back in now 4.7 no what's what's going on have I got it like is it locked up in some State because it's not it's not changing try to turn it off and on again I'm going to remove the USB power here we go okay communication with the device failed I think that's what it popped up is that what it popped up with before okay let's plug it back in okay I'm reconnected it's redone its thing okay now it's down to zero volts aux voltage now let me plug in the aux Supply again 4.7 volts okay now we're good so again if I short out that Supply rail it's USB current but it's only drawing it's only drawing 24 million 29 milliamps from the ox so let me let's say set it to five Watts or something there we go 1.2 amps now from from the USB is 1.2 so that why no my USB port's not capable of 1.2 I think there's a bug there I think I found a bug um something's going on with the monitoring I I think I've discussed oh and it's and it's not okay and I've got it the load is no longer shorted and it's still showing two red buttons down below so it's still but it's dropped down to 680 milliamps but it's still the master enable is on off on 680 right ah there you go it's not actually recovering automatically one point and none of that currents come in from the external arcs which are there I did for a second there am I gonna I'm physically around with that so is that they are no I think I've got a Dicky connection maybe I don't have the correct Barrel Jack yeah what diameter Pinner have they used on that I've tried three different five volt plug packs now and they are they're all not the correct diameter yeah so that's embarrassing um all the plug packs I can find here five volt ones are all uh 2.5 millimeter pin and this thing is 2.1 millimeter pin but yeah you can see that when it's actually connected all of the current all of the output current comes from 1.2 amps there is been supplied from the auxiliary device oh now it's oh now it's now now it's disconnected oh like I said yeah so there's an intermittent contact so if you've got intermittent contact on your power supply um yeah it's sort of the comms the USB comms comes gutter a little bit I don't know if that's like a hardware a small Hardware issue or whether or not but just to use a reliable power supply don't be like idiot Dave so what I'm doing is I'm shorting the input and you'll notice that the persistence there is like 10 millivolts um so that's like I'm not sure where it's getting that from so because the I mean if we stop it right we start the noise is not as high as what those Peaks show there so that's interesting so like it surely it doesn't have a like a peak detect mode it's not it's not that advanced anyway we can add measurements here so we can go channel one and then we've got horizontal vertical or custom and then we can go over there or our vertical ones so AC RMS so that's what we want to measure our noise I've done a video on acrms hello ad it's automatic it looks like it's automatically added them all really okay yeah there you go anyway RMS um AC oh stopped RMS AC noise is 0.6 so 600 micro volts uh there at this particular time base and Sample rate go down it drops a bit there you go yep expand the time base it's drop in yeah because uh we've got limit this is going to be determined by your memory depth as well because I've done a video on oscilloscope noise and uh stuff like that I'll have to link those in but yeah 250 microvolts so you know up to one and a half millivolts AC RMS of noise uh there right at the top end and I'm not hugely interested in like measuring crosstalk and its performance and all that you know leave it in the comments down below if you want me to do actual you know proper performance measurements on this thing but um yeah I'm just just having a play with it today just to see what's what and the auto set seems to work on this thing no worries whatsoever and there we go yeah well I'm don't want to trigger on either there you go so let's have a play you know and also there's like record functions and there's all sorts of like there's just tons of stuff on here I mean just look at this we can do an XYZ plot yeah look we can we can rotate this around right so we can get an isometric view of that right check this out I've got an XYZ plot and you can choose what your X Y and Z axes are and then you've got your isometric view okay I should actually can I expand that to full screen yeah I can right and then we can we can move your isometric viewer around it's just amazing what we can actually do with that right and then we've got an X Y as well right so you can do your or your regularly this is just patterns and all that sort of stuff so that's not going to look very good at the moment but that is just to read like I'm not even using like a proper example to show you here right I'm just I'm just sticking around so I can get an fft there on channel two and there you go that's the fft on channel two there it's going to give you your usual like fft capabilities once again like like I'm not going to check like go into performance stuff and things like that so there's our 100 kilohertz uh sine wave there that's the orange uh channel one and then the uh second one the blue one is uh channel two there so you know we've got all our usual fft stuff plus all this extra capability and we can put all these dock them on different screens imagine if you had like five or six six screens and then as I said like we've got a spectrogram as well can we go full screen on that right there's our spectrogram once again not not the best example right but the fact that you can actually do this stuff is just incredible and there's a 3D spectrogram right come on come on seriously this is fantastic right so this is like really like unfortunately it doesn't work in the RF domain right this is low frequency stuff but it gives students the idea and if you're learning uh this sort of stuff and you can get to learn what an eye diagram is and a spectrogram and you know all sorts of uh stuff you can learn all this stuff and you can change all the axes to be anything you want and it's just like come on this is just an incredible learning tool if this is not the de facto standard in schools I'd I don't know what is right so what that basically showing is a frequency right this is the Spectrum analyzer right the x-axis is uh frequency there and that's showing our 100 kilohertz Peak there and it's basically just giving us all that information in 3D over time of course that's just for a single sine wave we can go to that more complex waveform we had on channel two and look look at that beautiful and then you can change all the axes and you can change all the scale in and you can do whatever like and I haven't even looked at like the login like and and just just a voltmeter right we can just get like you can just use it as a voltmeter it's not terrific because you don't have like proper multimeter uh capability but you know it's it's there right and then we've got the logger haven't even looked at the logic analyzer I haven't looked at the pattern generator I haven't looked at this static i o where you can like just yeah here we go we can just turn on outputs can we I don't know haven't enabled it whatever sure it all works fine and the then you get amazing stuff like a network analyzer impedance analyzers just like that the Bode 100 that I've got I've done videos on that and then a curved Tracer uh it's probably only going to go up to the supply of the you know you can't test at high voltages component curve tracing right so that you can learn how like curve tracers work and protocol decoders and then you can script all this like anyway serious hats off to digiland who's ni uh now but yeah hats off to the team who actually develop not not just the hardware but you know because the Hardware's just the hardware I'm not going to say it's not great but you know it's it's just right it's just Hardware it's an fpga with some analog digital all the magic is in the software this is what you're paying for right this is just not and I haven't even like seriously I barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do anyway that this video is more than long enough it's not a proper review it's just a first you know playing around with First Impressions let me know your thoughts and comments down below but yeah like seriously this is just an incredible bit of Kit you should um I think especially if you're on the road or something like that and you want like an all-in-one you want to you know just get like do use a scope out in the field just and I'm sure you can buy and also people have developed I'm sure open source like interfaces for this thing front ends I've just got this one um which is a basic BNC and this is uh this single ends your input too if you get this board so it converts your differential um into a single-ended single-ended input and output then you can probably get ones with like um you know screw terminal power supply interfaces and all sorts of stuff and it's just it's it's an amazing bit of Kit and for like under 300 US dollars I know it does sound expensive for what you get but the software capabilities are just insane in this thing and it's worth every cent but of course as I said this is not a replacement for a desktop oscilloscope right you still need your desktop oscilloscope with your proper front end and your high bandwidth and yada yada right your huge memory depth and everything else right this has got relatively small memory depth because it doesn't sample in real time it it captures it in the fpga buffer and then dumps it um so you know there's lots of blind time and everything right it's not a real oscilloscope but yeah this way and the capabilities more than make up for this so yes you should have a bench topscope and one of these it's just amazing anyway hope you found that useful if you did give it a big thumbs up as always discuss down below and over on the EV blog forum catch you next time [Music] thank you thank you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 80,560

Keywords: eevblog, video

Id: 5SbNnaMM1tQ

Length: 49min 54sec (2994 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023