Pmod Hardware Compatibility Guide

Welcome to the Pmod hardware compatibility guide! Although you likely have seen a Pmod that meets your needs either in our store or on the Wiki, an important question remains: will the Pmod be able to physically interface with my hardware? This guide will walk through how one can determine this using Digilent system boards as an example (considering this is the Digilent Wiki and all).

But first, a clarification. Some of you may have noticed on other pages of the Wiki or seen elsewhere that Pmods are compatible with any system board that is able to use the same communication protocol that the Pmod uses to communicate. Why bother talking about compatibility at all?

Here's the secret: when writing software (i.e. code), if you have enough time, experience, and talent, you can program your setup to do anything you want, much like an FPGA can be programmed to do anything you want it to do.

But for those of us in the mortal world, including myself, it simply isn't going to be worth the effort on our end to figure out how to get all of this setup, leaving us with using the tools that are already provided for us. As comforting as it is to know some of the work may has already been done for us, how are we able to tell if such tools are available with our setup? Let's take a look.

There are two main ways in which a Pmod is connected to a host system: through a Pmod connector present on the host board or by individually wiring the 100 mil spaced pins on the Pmod header to I/O pins on the host board.