Getting Started with the Digilent Toolbox Add-on for MATLAB®

Note: The WaveForms set up process is found in the WaveForms Getting Started Guide. By installing the current release of WaveForms, the WaveForms SDK will be installed, which is needed by the Data Acquisition Toolbox to properly work with Digilent devices.

Connect an Analog Discovery 2 (AD2) device to a Windows system and then launch WaveForms. Verify the AD2 is listed in WaveForms’ Device Manager as ‘Discovery2’. Note that other devices are also supported. The AD2 is used by this guide for demonstration purposes.

Exit WaveForms and launch MATLAB® R2021b or newer.

Once in MATLAB®, select the HOME tab. Click on the Add-Ons menu option and select Manage Add-Ons.

In the Add-On Manager, if the original ‘Data Acquisition Toolbox Support Package for Digilent Analog Discovery Hardware’ item is installed, then it will need to be uninstalled prior to installing the new Digilent Toolbox. Select the ‘Data Acquisition Toolbox Support Package for Digilent Analog Discovery Hardware’ and then click on the vertical ellipsis to the far right. Select ‘Uninstall’.

Next, in the upper right corner, click on ‘Get Add-Ons'.

In the Add-On Explorer’s search field, enter ‘Digilent Toolbox’ and then select the add-on.

Click OK in the popup message window. The message informs the user that the ‘Digilent Toolbox’ was not developed by MathWorks®, but by Digilent and is supported by Digilent.

Once on the ‘Digilent Toolbox’ add-on page, click the ‘Add’ button and select ‘Add to MATLAB’.

A successful installation will show ‘Installed’ on the add-on icon.

The Add-On Manager should show the new Digilent Toolbox. Close the Add-On Manager.

Back in the MATLAB® workspace, the directory field shows the path for the newly installed Digilent Toolbox files.

``(C:\users\{user}\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB Add-Ons\Collections\Digilent Toolbox)``

Next, in the Command Window, enter ‘daqvendorlist’ to view the supported vendors. The new Digilent Toolbox will indicate a driver version of 3.19.5 or newer.

If the original ‘Data Acquisition Toolbox Support Package for Digilent Analog Discovery Hardware’ was not removed, then the ‘digilent’ vendor would appear as ‘Not Operational’, since it would have required an older driver version of WaveForms.

With the list of provided examples shown on the left, double-click on the ‘all_systems.m’ script to open the example in the MATLAB® Editor. This script was written to use an AD2 device, as noted by ‘AD2_0’. An AD2 was wired as instructed by the commented top lines of the script, in order to generate the two ramps shown in Figure 1 of the screen capture.

This script uses two oscilloscope channels, one arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), one programmable power supply channel, and all the digital channels on the AD2 device.

Included with the Digilent Toolbox files is a getting started file, GettingStarted.mlx, with snippets of function calls.