analog discovery 2 Daisy Chaining the AD2

[Ryne Horn]

Hey Everyone!

I've been playing around with the AD2 for the past week or two and I'll have to say, I'm impressed at the bang for the buck here.  However, in its current state, it seems to be a tool for hobbyists and tinkerers (which is great!), but can be lacking for creating a really sophisticated control system.  I was wondering if it is possible to scale up the number of ADC (specifically) by making use of the trigger I/O pins in a daisy chain fashion to create maybe a 10 ADC channel system (5xAD2).  I'm not sure it is available (or I just did not Google hard enough) but it would be great if Waveforms 2015 could interface multiple AD2 in a single script.  This would allow a syncing up to the 5 AD2s allowing all data collected from each AD2 to be used in the script to adjust certain aspects of each AD2s outputs.  Is this possible, within Waveforms 2015 or would I need to move to a custom piece of UI to handle this? If it is the latter are there any good resources?  I'd rather not invest the time to start from scratch...        

[JColvin]

Hello @Ryne Horn,

I am not an instrumentation expert, so I won't be of infinite help here, although the creator of the WaveForms software commonly checks this subforum so they will be able to assist you with any specific questions, but you can control multiple Analog Discovery 2's through the WaveForms scripting capability and through the WaveForms SDK. The reference material for the WaveForms SDK (which also lists in section one where some pre-made examples are on your machine) is available on our Wiki here: https://reference.digilentinc.com/_media/reference/software/waveforms/waveforms-3/waveforms_rm.pdf.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
JColvin

[attila]

Hi @Ryne Horn

See the following post:

 

[Ryne Horn]

Hi @JColvin and @attila,

I actually have stumbled across these post in my search.  If I were to rephrase my question, I am looking more for how do I either swap between devices or tether the devices together so that I can control all of them from a single script within Waveform 2015.  I have very limited knowledge of the functions available to me within that program and there seems to be only a small list of commands available on the internet from what I have found.  It may very well be that I need to move this project outside of waveform to accomplish the task.  I am needing these devices to run as close to simultaneous as possible to work for what I am wanting it to work for.  It would also be great if this was compatible with Matlab.  There was a post a while back about creating this compatibility but it seems no other news has come back after that.

Thanks,

Ryne

[JColvin]

Hi @Ryne Horn,

I know there is a FDwfEnum function in the SDK that will build a list of the compatible devices that are connected to the host board and then lets you choose which device to manipulate based on the index value built from that list, so that should let you be able to access multiple devices within one script. @attila will be able to comment better (or correct me if I am entirely wrong).

Thanks,
JColvin

[attila]

Hi @Ryne Horn

You should take in consideration that the devices have independent oscillators which could cause phase shift. Triggering mechanism can be used for periodic resynchronization.

In WaveForms application the device can't be changed from Script.
A custom application/script can open and control multiple devices at a time. 

The last WF SDK manual and examples are by default installed on Windows to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Digilent\WaveFormsSDK\ 

[Ryne Horn]

Thank you, both for your answers.  I will start developing!