This piece of hardware is basically a voltage and current source. It is part of the requirements for a basic analogue electronics laboratory. On its own it is useless to anyone who does not understand the value of such a tool. As part of a collection of equipment for analogue experimentation it is an essential part.
The device has two identical channels channel A and channel B. Each channel can provide either a fixed voltage, a fixed current, a function generator offering sine wave, triangular wave, sawtooth wave, square wave, staircase wave with all of these available in either voltage or current sources.
The range of voltage available is from 0 to 5 V, and the range of current is approximately plus or minus 200mA.
At any one time each channel can be set either to source voltage and measure current or to source current and measure voltage or to high impedance and measure voltage.
The supporting software Pixelpulse2 is being developed as an open source product on GITHUB with Analog Devices employing one of the developers. The software is available for Linux, Mac or Windows. It is perfectly correct that the current documentation is extremely lacking and the number of people have failed to get this product working on Windows. This is sad because a working Windows version exists and is relatively easy to get hold of. The project needs to update the README file on GITHUB so that people can easily find the released versions.
The current stable version can be found at:-
https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/pixelpulse2/releases with a Windows installation package.
This version is basically functioning but has a few stability issues. These issues have been fixed in the latest version, which is available at:-
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/analogdevicesinc/pixelpulse2/build/artifacts
what should be understood is this is a development version and changes as they develop the program. At any particular time this could be fully working or broken. If you have difficulties it is easy to raise an issue with the project and issues seem to be looked at quickly.
If you know what this tool can do and what it's limitations are it is a very value for money purchase.
If you buy this thinking it is going that you are going to get a complete course at this moment and that this tool is all you need then you will be very disappointed. Sadly the device is being sold and the information on the websites and box is very optimistic, offering far more than is easily available today.
Analog on their site does have a full course of instruction on analogue design however as yet this is more aimed at users of Diligents student tools than at this particular piece of hardware. Hopefully Analog will start rewriting this to use the ADALM1000 in the near future.
In summary if you know what this tool can do and what it's limitations are it is a very good value for money if you don't then wait till the documentation and other aids are available as of yet this is not a beginners tool.
