Enjoyed listening to Clint on The Amp Hour

[hamster]

I case you haven't heard it already check out an interview with Clint Cole (one of Digilent's founders) on The Amp Hour.

http://www.theamphour.com/302-an-interview-with-clint-cole-of-digilent/

The company history sounds very different than I imagined it was...

[JColvin]

Agreed. Even having worked with Digilent for a little over two years now there were a number of things that I hadn't known before. Like nearly going belly up on a printer purchase.

I guess I'm curious to know what kind of company you imagined Digilent started out as from a customer perspective (if you don't mind sharing).

[D@n]

One thing I find surprising, but perhaps should not, is how focused Digilent's roots are in the academic community.  I guess I had always seen it as a sort of low-end demo-board outlet for Xilinx, rather than a company whose purpose from the beginning was to supply student usable parts for computer engineering work.

The whole discussion of pricing was quite fascinating as well.

Finally, I really enjoyed Clint's encouragement to get into the weeds and actually build things.  I know from my standpoint, I was always frustrated when I tried to study communications systems that the comms classes I took never taught the tools necessary to really build things: phase locked loops.  It was fascinating to hear, in the audio, the same sentiment expressed by the host for learning to build circuit boards and never teaching how to understand power supplies.

I guess I have a long way to go, but it was nice to be encouraged,

Dan