free DSO for electronics beginner?

[exe]

Analog scopes can be got for free or cheap.

There are DIY kits like DSO138, was quite usefull, despite very limited specs. I believe it has a very good educational value.

[PlainName]

"can anyone give me a free car"

That might work as often as getting a scope!

It can cost money to scrap a car, so an old banger being taken away for nothing could be attractive to the (soon to be) ex-owner.

'Course, getting it roadworthy and keeping it taxed and filled with juice is going to cost many times what the car is worth, so perhaps not a perfect analogy.

[sokoloff]

Analog scopes can be got for free or cheap.

Agreed. I was at the MIT Swapfest this weekend and you had your pick of probably 15 or more old Analog scopes in the $50-75 asking price range and I suspect $30-50 would have bought most any of them.

[Ian.M]

OTOH if I had an old 1980's DSO gathering dust, with a fading green CRT and only 4K sample memory, it might well be 'Free to a good home', though I'd strongly encourage the O.P. to look for a 50MHz or better delay timebase CRO instead as those DSO dinosaurs are an absolute PITA to use and maintain and were often less capable than the DSO138 mentioned above.

[gnavigator1007]

Nothing in particular against the OP who was at least polite, but it amazes me how often people think they might get a free 'scope just be asking. Would you go onto a petrolhead forum and ask "can anyone give me a free car" as a first post?

I just would like to remind folks that Dave himself has said on more than one occasion that people on the forum may be willing to part with and have parted with oscilloscopes for free. I don't think it was really an effort to drive a bunch of scope seeking traffic to the forum, but more a way of letting beginners know that these are attainable items at a potentially low cost. I don't understand why outright asking if anybody has a freebie is so often frowned upon. I appreciate that this OP has handled this quite well and if I could help them out I would. You've gotta consider that a significant number of people are coming from youtube and when we react badly to a request for something that the site owner has said has happened before, we end up alienating people that may have much more to contribute further down the road.

[tautech]

Nothing in particular against the OP who was at least polite, but it amazes me how often people think they might get a free 'scope just be asking. Would you go onto a petrolhead forum and ask "can anyone give me a free car" as a first post?

I just would like to remind folks that Dave himself has said on more than one occasion that people on the forum may be willing to part with and have parted with oscilloscopes for free.

Yeah right and if you remember Dave takes a nice little Tek on a mud run and totally shags it when it could've gone to a scope newbie close to him or be given away in a contest. 

[gnavigator1007]

I just would like to remind folks that Dave himself has said on more than one occasion that people on the forum may be willing to part with and have parted with oscilloscopes for free.

Yeah right and if you remember Dave takes a nice little Tek on a mud run and totally shags it when it could've gone to a scope newbie close to him or be given away in a contest. 

  This is very true, but you gotta consider the people out there that just watched a few EEVBlog videos on youtube after it was recommended by an algorithm, missed the more tool abusive content, & then came to the forum convinced we're all just drowning in spare scopes & ready to help launch some newbie down the path to fixing their gaming console and spending the rest of their life in the TEA thread. Nobody over there is taking Tek anything on a freakin mud run lol

[cyndernight]

Nothing in particular against the OP who was at least polite, but it amazes me how often people think they might get a free 'scope just be asking. Would you go onto a petrolhead forum and ask "can anyone give me a free car" as a first post?

I just would like to remind folks that Dave himself has said on more than one occasion that people on the forum may be willing to part with and have parted with oscilloscopes for free. I don't think it was really an effort to drive a bunch of scope seeking traffic to the forum, but more a way of letting beginners know that these are attainable items at a potentially low cost. I don't understand why outright asking if anybody has a freebie is so often frowned upon. I appreciate that this OP has handled this quite well and if I could help them out I would. You've gotta consider that a significant number of people are coming from youtube and when we react badly to a request for something that the site owner has said has happened before, we end up alienating people that may have much more to contribute further down the road.

not gunna lie but this was very similar to what happened...  i was looking around for electronics help on the EEVblog YT channel, and he mentioned in a video cheap scopes and to ask the blog as trades / sells / unwanted things can be found there sometimes.

i do have some headway on this...  asked around, and friends & family put a little pool together for me, ive got 250-300 now... so its no longer "free"  but,  250 still isnt much for a DSO...   >.<

i was trying to get this,  rigol DS1054Z...    but it went way above my limited gift-budgeting...

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Rigol-1054z-4-channel-oscilloscope/232808946886?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m1431.l2649

dave said the DS1054Z was good, but.. yeah...  too much now.. so back to square one trying to find a beginner friendly DSO for next to nothing...

[Ian.M]

Yes, that's a bit on the slim side for anything decent even in USB DSOs.
Don't forget that bargain basement scopes often don't come with probes and a pair of x1/x10 switchable probes will set you back $50 AUD or more retail.  However it wouldn't be a bad idea to go back and edit the thread title to 'Very cheap DSO for electronics beginner and edit the first post to mention you have a limited budget.

Don't rule out CROs, you can get a long way with a decent one, though they are no good for capturing essentially random one-off events, and manual protocol decoding of more than a couple of bytes of serial data is a stone cold bitch of a job to do and highly susceptible to human error, even if you can get the device you are testing to repeat the data in a fast enough loop, + output a pulse once per loop for your delay timebase CRO to trigger on.   

Back in the day, I'd decode serial data manually on a CRO, marking the bits on an acetate taped to the screen, for about two bytes worth, with the Y attenuator set to give me about a 1 div high trace of the data with the clock below it then shifting the delay and  both channels Y position for the next two bytes etc. till I either had the whole data packet or ran out of space on the acetate.   You couldn't pay me to do that nowadays - my eyes aren't getting any younger and if your business is too cheap to buy basic modern testgear, its probably too cheap to reliably make payroll or pay insurance.

If you *ever* find the need to inspect serial data on a CRO, other than checking one repeating byte for levels, risetime and other signal quality issues, its time to get a cheap logic analyser or if your wallet's plump enough, a four channel DSO with protocol decoding like the  DS1054Z.

[cyndernight]

Yes, that's a bit on the slim side for anything decent even in USB DSOs.
Don't forget that bargain basement scopes often don't come with probes and a pair of x1/x10 switchable probes will set you back $50 AUD or more retail.  However it wouldn't be a bad idea to go back and edit the thread title to 'Very cheap DSO for electronics beginner and edit the first post to mention you have a limited budget.

Don't rule out CROs, you can get a long way with a decent one, though they are no good for capturing essentially random one-off events, and manual protocol decoding of more than a couple of bytes of serial data is a stone cold bitch of a job to do and highly susceptible to human error, even if you can get the device you are testing to repeat the data in a fast enough loop, + output a pulse once per loop for your delay timebase CRO to trigger on.   

Back in the day, I'd decode serial data manually on a CRO, marking the bits on an acetate taped to the screen, for about two bytes worth, with the Y attenuator set to give me about a 1 div high trace of the data with the clock below it then shifting the delay and  both channels Y position for the next two bytes etc. till I either had the whole data packet or ran out of space on the acetate.   You couldn't pay me to do that nowadays - my eyes aren't getting any younger and if your business is too cheap to buy basic modern testgear, its probably too cheap to reliably make payroll or pay insurance.

If you *ever* find the need to inspect serial data on a CRO, other than checking one repeating byte for levels, risetime and other signal quality issues, its time to get a cheap logic analyser or if your wallet's plump enough, a four channel DSO with protocol decoding like the  DS1054Z.

what do you think of these two?

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Siglent-Digital-Oscilloscope-Model-SDS1052DL-50MHZ-2-CHANNEL/332422082983?epid=2256522076&hash=item4d65e671a7:g:paEAAOSwcUBYJRA8

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Hantek-DSO4072C-Digital-Oscilloscope-2CH-70MHz-Bandwidth-1GSa-s/282955555530?epid=1165254225&hash=item41e17722ca:g:DAQAAOSwkcBa7-zK


kinda like the look of the latter one.. its outside my price but looks nice?

[julianhigginson]

I've given away an unwanted scope before.... yeah, maybe I could have put it on ebay for $50, but what had happened was it was just sitting around collecting dust because I couldn't be bothered dealing with getting rid of it via ebay.... Also knowing it was going to someone who was interested to use it was a good feeling.
Getting free old stuff is just a matter of asking at the right place and the right time when someone has something to offload.

Since nobody seems to have a spare old unused instrument here, it's probably worth talking alternatives.

If the OP has access to a little bit of money, there is bitscope USB scope which attaches to a computer for display and control.. their smallest one is pretty good for the money.. Available at element 14, or you can buy direct from them (they are in sydney!) Now if you could afford a good standalone scope I wouldn't be recommending it at all..... it's not the most intuiative thing going (and i seem to remember there was some wonky stuff going on with the software trying to minimise the reality of DC offsets when I last tried using one) but for a very tight budget it would do the job of looking at pretty much everything the OP has mentioned working on with 2 scope channels, a couple of logic channels, and even a basic waveform generator, and decent display size due to being a PC based instrument.
http://bitscope.com/product/BS05/