And i do not know what the folks meant who said their boards "worked". Did they mean it "generated something"? They did not bother verifying the device performance against the specification.
Thanks Bud! I think that the meaning of 'worked' (for some of them, or some of us) could be considered as workable - as in at least functions - generates some dds waveforms - controllable --- rather than immediately a DOA or totally lost cause.
I was certainly interested to know whether or not at least some, or the bulk of these modules were workable ..... eg. if order 5 of them, then 3 or 4 of them might have a chance of functioning - right off the bat, without modifications. Not necessarily elite grade performance.
The work you did with it is excellent. Definitely very useful.
At the moment, I'm still in the process of figuring out the programming/SPI communications and commands side of things from the AD9959 pdf document ---- and hopefully get all that understood -- just to see if any one of my three boards are alive. I figured that hopefully 3 boards improves chances to see 1 functioning.
One thing that would be (or would have been) nice is knowing whether these modules have a default setting --- so that at least 1 channel (eg. channel 0, or 1 or 2 or 3) can just be generating a sinewave straight from start-up ..... by default. Then at least us newbies would be able to tell if it's alive or not.
Right now, my understanding (even if it might be wrong) is that the four channels are enabled by default ----- but the frequency tuning words (for controlling the frequency) are all zero. So I'm assuming that we're not going to be seeing any sinewave by default because the frequency is 'zero' for start-up, right?
Think about calling ADI or going to their support forum and saying "I want to purchase a board with your chip wired in a bizarre way. Will it work?"
I don't think I would want to burden them with that particular question, as any issues with poor design in the ebay module is really end-user fault. I was initially having thoughts about purchasing their evaluation board module, which looks quite large, but has a nice chance of working properly right off the bat.