Side Note: Why we based many our products on Analog Discovery 

 
Digilent Analog Discovery is a series of devices that being sold by Digilent. Digilent was bought by National Instrument many years ago, and again, bought by Emerson. It was originally marketed as a device meant for Electronics Engineering Student with subsidies from Analog Devices and Xilinx. The original Analog Discovery (the black one) was sold at $99 to students. 
 
The founder of SpecialtyCircuits used it when he was fighting to learn Verilog. Although that battle failed in 2012, but the founder learnt the capacities of it. Later, Digilent released many more updated versions, Analog Discovery 2, Analog Discovery 3, Analog Discovery Pro 3450, etc. Each new release brings interesting features. 
 
Since the founder of SpecialtyCircuits bears an Analytical Chemistry Ph.D. degree, instead of Electrical Engineering, he spent majority of his time in scientific and industrial instrumentation. Analog Discovery devices bring a lot of useful and necessary features suitable for his interests. To list a few:
  1. 14-bit analog input channel resolution is much better than the 8-bit resolution typical oscilloscope brings to the table. 
  2. Maximum 125MSPS acquisition sampling rate is above vast majority need of instrumentation.
  3. The built-in FPGA support hardware averaging, that effectively turn the device into 16-bit at lower sampling rate.
  4. The built-in on FPGA averaging, also played as a low pass filter, removing the high frequency noise/interference and switching power supply spikes, which dominate in typical scientific instrumentation settings. 
  5. The API interface design and firmware coding is very decent in terms of communication latency. We are able to archive as high as 300FPS imaging via USB communication in synthetic communication overhead tests. 
  6. They come with two waveform generators. This is great for controlling a X-Y scan scenarios. Typical oscilloscope only come with signal channel AWG, thus incapable to scan a 2D space. It is a perfect condition a single device play multiple roles to reduce solution size and cost.
  7.  Earlier release has limited internal buffer size, but support Play and Record mode, so long waveform can be supported if reduced sampling rate is allowed. 
  8. Later release like the Pro series support 64KS in normal mode, which is larger than most oscilloscope or cheap waveform generator
  9. Later Pro series also support DRAM buffer in AWG, that can do 10MSPS update rate with 32MS buffer size. This even beats some commercial AWGs in term memory depth. 
  10. Later software updates allowed the device to be used as SPI and I2C master controller. This allows us to add additional custom mixed-domain control board into our system without introducing new SPI/I2C bridge circuit just so the PC can control them. The PC can control the high-speed AWG and Digitizer on Analog Discovery together with SPI/I2C control on low-speed custom support electronics, all via a single USB port.
  11. The SPI and I2C API of Waveforms SDK are very well designed. There is not much many SPI bridge devices that support independent read delay and write delay in SPI communication. It is generally hard to come across MCUs or bridge ICs that support read latency option, which is required for some sigma-delta ADCs. 
  12. The Digital Discovery series is a spin-off of the Analog Discovery. It supports very flexible digital output and input capacities. We have a project driving an actively cooled CCD. Typical solution requires use of FPGA to generate the gate waveforms and double sampling on the CCD outputs. Writing a FPGA firmware may not be a hard task, but supporting USB communication on FPGA will be quite some work without generating much competitive advantage in analog electronics. The Digital Discovery (also Analog Discovery when less than 16 pin needed.) provides such a feasible API interface that we don't need to involve FPGA to acquire signal from CCD at 10MSPS sampling rate.