Suggestions for a digital oscilloscope
MJHanagan
Posts: 189
My next hobby acquisition is likely to be a digital oscilloscope. Primary uses will be for monitoring I/O lines (e.g. watching SPI communications) and some fairly slow varying voltage signals (<1kHz). I'm a newbie so probably a 2-channel would suffice and I don't think I will need anything faster than ~1 MHz.
I have been eyeing these Tektronics TDS's on eBay which seem to be selling for ~$400 (TDS1002B). I also looked at the Propscope which sells for about half the cost ($200) and can handle 4 logic input lines.
Are there any compelling reasons to consider a standalone DSO over the Propscope? Are these Propscopes reliable?
I have been eyeing these Tektronics TDS's on eBay which seem to be selling for ~$400 (TDS1002B). I also looked at the Propscope which sells for about half the cost ($200) and can handle 4 logic input lines.
Are there any compelling reasons to consider a standalone DSO over the Propscope? Are these Propscopes reliable?
Comments
www.bitscope.com
Couple of questions:
- Is the 40MS/s (analogue in) shared between all four channels or is it 4x 40MS/s?
- 10 bit resolution (analogue in) is nice. Is there any exceptions like only below certain sample rates? How clean is the signal?
- I note the 16kS/ch built-in capture capacity. Can it be configured to sample indefinitely or at least for mega-samples per capture by streaming continuously, and live display, back to the PC?
- The picture shows only the bread board and no BNC adaptors. There is a quad BNC adaptor for it's smaller (Analog Discovery) brother. Is this also usable, or an equivalent, on the Electronics Explorer?
The expansion card that comes with the PropScope uses 4 of these for LSA readings- but if you needed more you could make a custom card.
Hanno
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$> WINEARCH=win32 wine digilent.waveforms_v2.2.4.exe
Then to run it while hiding the pile of errors from spewing:
$> WINEDEBUG=-all WINEARCH=win32 wine 'c:/Program Files/Digilent/WaveForms/WaveForms.exe' >/dev/null
The simulation works fine. Don't know if it can connect to real hardware though, which is where PropTool falls over.
For your target price but far better bandwidth have a took at these scopes:
http://www.rigolna.com/products/digital-oscilloscopes/ds1000e/ds1052e/ 50MHz DSO
http://www.rigolna.com/products/digital-oscilloscopes/ds1000e/ds1102e/ 100MHz DSO
and for a little higher price:
http://www.rigolna.com/products/digital-oscilloscopes/ds1000d/ds1052d/ 50MHz MSO (dual analog + 16 digital)
Todays Rigol scopes are really good. Some good friends (heads of www.AllData.it company, who sale test equipment/bench, also in the military field) has told me that they have many USA customers which require expressly Rigol scopes as part of test bench, some of them installed in the usa army tanks.
I spent several times more money to get a four channel deep capture memory scope a decade ago. Admittedly, I ended up with an 8Mpt/ch scope where as these are only 8Kpt/ch.
The deep memory is really cool for looking at logic sequences. Often don't even bother with triggering. Just press the stop button and start perusing the captured waveforms.