This page supports the Engineering toolbox that all students receive when the enrol in the BEng and MEng programmes in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at UCL.
Whats in the toolbox
NI myDAQ data acquisition device
This data acquisition device connects to a PC running windows and provides the functionality of an oscilloscope (20kHz bandwidth), arbitrary waveform generator and digital multimeter. It also provides +-15V and 5V DC power and 8 digital IO ports.
The NI myDAQ will be used in the first year laboratories and in the Analog and Power Electronics course.
More details and support material.
TI MSP430 Launchpad Microcontroller
The launchpad is a complete microcontroller prototyping system containing a TI MSP430G2553 micro controller with USB programmer for the development of low power embedded systems. Typical applications include low-cost sensor systems that capture analog signals, convert them to digital values, and then process the data for display or for transmission to a host system. The MSP430G2553 is a capable device but still simple enough to program and understand at the hardware (register) level.
The MSP430 Launchpad will be used in the First Year Introduction the Electronic Engineering and in the second integrated engineering project.
More details and support material.
Freescale FRDM-KL25Z Microcontroller
The FRDM-KL25Z is an ultra-low-cost development platform for Kinetis L Series KL1x and KL2x microcontrollers built on ARM® Cortex™-M0+ processor. Features include easy access to MCU I/O, battery-ready, low-power operation. The board also includes a three axis accelerometer, RGB LED and capacitive slider. This device supports ARMs mbed wed based integrated development environment so that you can get started programming the device without installing any software at all. This is a more powerful device than the MSP430 but with complexity comes more abstraction from the hardware.
DE0-Nano FPGA Development Board
The DE0-Nano is a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development platform suited for prototyping circuit designs such as robots and “portable” projects. The board contains a USB programmer for easy programming of the Altera Cyclone® IV EP4CE22F17C6N FPGA. The DE0-Nano has a collection of interfaces including two external GPIO headers to extend designs beyond the DE0-Nano board, on-board memory devices including SDRAM and EEPROM for larger data storage and frame buffering, as well as general user peripheral with 8 LEDs, 4 DIP switches and 2 push-buttons.
Programming of this FPGA is carried out using the Altera Quartus II integrated development environment (IDE). The Web edition of Quartus II is free to download and install on Windows or Linux. It will however happily run under bootcamp or parallels.
This board will be used in the first year digital circuits course and the second year digital design course.
Benn Thomsen 