How to Create Graphical Images With the Analog Discovery 2 (Fritzing)

Fritzing is an incredibly useful tool that makes it easy to document circuits and projects. Fritzing contains a large amount of built in components that you can drag into your image and basic as wires, resistors and capacitors, up to custom microcontrollers and sensors.

Recently Digilents, who makes FPGAs, microcontrollers, expansion modules (Pmods), and instrumentation products started releasing Fritzing parts for their products. You may notice I created a bunch of them :).

The products that have Fritzing parts, have a part on their Wiki page. And if there are any that don't, there's a set of handy tutorials on how to create your own.

Generally when you upload a part you can just add it to your image and start connecting components and wires. But with the Analog Discovery 2, the wire connection is a specific flywire assembly. This means that each channel corresponds with a specific color of wires. With 2 Oscilloscope channels, 2 Waveform Generator channels, 2 triggers, 2 power supplies and 16 Digital IOs that's a lot of wires and color changing. I've written this tutorial to make it easier.

Step 1: Download the Analog Discovery 2 Fritzing Part

The Analog Discovery 2 Fritzing part is located on the Analog Discovery 2 page on the Digilent Wiki.

Go to the page and click on the Fritzing icon to download it.

Step 2: Upload the Part to Fritzing

Fritzing is a quick download and install from Fritzing.org.

After you open Fritzing click on my Parts to open the my Parts bin on the top right.

Click on the icon with 3 lines to open the menu and click import.

From here you can go to the location of the Analog Discovery 2 part and import it to your my parts bin.

Step 3: Drag the Part Into the Breadboard View

Once you import the part you should see the icon in your my parts bin.

To add it to the my parts bin, click on it and drag it into view.

Step 4: Notice the Pin Connections, Don't Add the Wires Yourself!

Notice that when you add the Analog Discovery 2 Fritzing part it doesn't contain any wires. When you create parts in the parts editor the components in the image are "frozen" meaning you can't implement them after you create the part. So the best way to do wires is to add pins, and use the built in Fritzing wires.

However, adding all of the wires and changing the colors takes a very long time, I did it twice.

So, I've done it for you....

Step 5: Download the Analog Discovery 2 With Wires Fritzing Project

Since I never want to create the wires again, I created a project with all of the correct wires in the correct colors saved.

You can download the project from this step and upload it to your project.

Make sure to follow the Digilent Blog to hear more about products and what products have Fritzing parts.