pydwf 1.1.19 — Table of Contents

Warning

Important Notice

Following Digilent’s decision in October 2023 to require creation of a login account to download the Waveforms software and the accompanying library that is needed to use their measurement devices, I decided to suspend my work on pydwf indefinitely. There will be no support for new features, no bug fixes, and no more user support from me either via Digilent’s user forum or via other channels.

The primary reason for this is that I consider it unethical to sell a hardware device that requires accompanying software downloads if those software downloads require a mandatory login account, given that account creation (1) requires mandatory acceptance of Terms and Conditions that were not part of the original hardware sale; and (2) requires the user to register personally identifiable data.

I realize that these kinds of unsavory practices are pervasive in the brave new world of modern technology, but my motivation to add value for such devices in my free time is precisely zero.

So for the time being (and probably forever, since I don’t expect Digilent to reverse course), version 1.1.19 will be the last pydwf release. It is essentially identical to version 1.1.18, with this notice prominently added.

Digilent used to be a pretty cool engineering-first company, providing very nice FPGA development boards and their excellent-value Analog Discovery devices. Unfortunately, their original customer oriented reputation is rapidly deteriorating by adopting customer-unfriendly practices, probably as a result of their acquisition by National Instruments back in 2013. It is all very unfortunate.

Winding down pydwf

  • I have taken the Github repository private on 18 October 2023 to prevent uncoordinated forks.

  • I am considering what to do with the existing pydwf packages on PyPI and the documentation on ReadTheDocs. For now they will remain, but at some point in the future I may remove them.

Given all this, if you are considering using pydwf for new projects: I’d advice against it.

If you have a dependency on pydwf, this may be a good time to consider ways to cut that dependency.

I apologise for the inconvenience.