Howdy from Ft. Worth, Texas, where another NI Connect came to a fabulous end last week. Digilent was proud to share new tech, provide live demonstrations of our fan favorites, and generally just participate in the fanfare of the whole week’s activities.
Academic Forum
2026 marked the second year of NI Connect’s Academic Forum, where industry and academia from around the world converge into a single room on the first day of the conference. We met with attendees from Guatemala, Norway, South Korea, and more as we discussed how we can work together to further engineering education and research. One of the highlights of the show was the presentation of Arizona State University’s Michael Goryll, who explained at length how important the Analog Discovery is in his classroom.
At ASU – home to more than 32,000 engineering students – delivering a consistent, high-quality lab experience across both in-person and fully online programs is no small feat. To meet that challenge, ASU has standardized on Digilent hardware to recreate authentic, hands-on labs anywhere students are. With tools like the Analog Discovery 3, students perform the same experiments they would in a traditional lab from their own desks without sacrificing rigor or depth. By consolidating multiple instruments into a single, portable platform, ASU has made labs more accessible, scalable, and cost-effective while maintaining the integrity of the engineering learning experience.
That flexibility shows up across disciplines. Electrical engineering students use Analog Discovery devices for everything from circuit analysis to impedance characterization, often working in parallel rather than waiting for shared equipment. In computer engineering, Digilent’s Basys 3 FPGA boards enable both in-lab and remote development workflows, while biomedical and communications students leverage NI and Digilent tools for data acquisition, signal processing, and software-defined radio. The result is a cohesive ecosystem where students can move seamlessly from foundational labs to advanced projects while gaining hands-on experience that brings theory to life, no matter where they’re learning.
Hands-On Demonstrations
After the Academic Forum came to a close, NI Connect attendees hustled over to the Experience Lounge, where NI and Digilent were able to showcase their most exciting products. Here, we showed off our academic chops while also letting the world know that Digilent’s reach extends to industry as well. We were especially excited to talk about the Digilent Analog Discovery Pro 2440 (link to product page), our newest professional grade mixed signal oscilloscope. It offers four Analog channels, 16 digital, and speeds up to 1 GS/s (on the 2450 model) while handling 13 different test instruments through WaveForms.
Having released in March, this was the first opportunity for the public to get hands-on with the ADP2440. In this demo, the device’s Arbitrary Waveform Generator created and pushed a signal to the four channels, and calling on WaveForms’ Scope device, ran that signal through a variety of filters. All of this is hosted on a Raspberry Pi using Linux in a DIN Rail mounted solution. You can see the video of the demonstration below.
We also brought along our new Analog Discovery Studio Max, the latest academic lab solution that gives professors the ability to use a single product across multiple engineering disciplines. We had a surprise guest – Carlo Manfredini from Emona-Tims – to commandeer the demo and showcase the Emona Communications Canvas. This new extension of the ADS Max Ecosystem enables students to practically build, test, and analyze real-world digital communication systems, bringing complex theoretical principles to life in the comfort of the classroom or lab. It’s something we’ve been working hard on with the ADS Max: the ability for a university or college to have a single unit that can be used for multiple courses in multiple degree plans.
The Round-Up
At NI Connect, one of the strongest themes we saw firsthand was the growing demand for scalable, hands-on engineering education and how critical the right tools are to making that possible. Through conversations with partners like Arizona State University and Emona, it’s clear that institutions are being pushed to deliver high-quality lab experiences across larger, more diverse student populations, including fully online learners. What stood out is how Digilent platforms are helping bridge that gap by giving students access to real instrumentation in a format that’s flexible, portable, and powerful enough to support everything from introductory labs to advanced experimentation.
We also spoke with many test engineers whose sentiments highlight just how critical a product like the ADP2440 is in modern workflows. As development cycles accelerate and systems become increasingly complex, engineers are actively seeking tools that combine performance, flexibility, and efficiency in a single platform. The Analog Discovery Pro line stands out by delivering a powerful mixed signal oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and waveform generation environment in a compact, cost‑effective form factor, directly addressing the need for streamlined debugging and validation. For engineers working in embedded systems, FPGA development, and advanced prototyping, this level of integration is not just convenient, but a highly relevant solution that aligns with how today’s test engineers want to work: faster, smarter, and with fewer constraints.
Stay tuned throughout the year to see how Digilent continues to push boundaries in electrical engineering, and who knows; maybe we’ll see you next year at NI Connect 2027!
