Easy-to-use USB oscilloscope

[Phil1977]

Hi,
after "plunging" into the forum due to the acute syndrom of "I wanna answer this", it may be time to introduce myself and also to put a new question...

I´m Phillip, year of manufacture 1977, PhD of physics and now since decades earning my money with use-case-specific measurement systems for science and production lines. At university it started that we need to build special measurement systems for exotic kind of matter, and since you could not buy any of the instruments you need for this off the shelf we had to construct everything on our own responsibility from mechanics over electronics, digital signal processing, computer vision up to software for the user interface. As more and more fascination for this kind of development developed itself, I worked in more and more projects of that kind - it was always more rewarding for me to be productive in R&D than to fight against each other in managment 

Just in case anyone is still interested: I have a question that this forum may be perfect for:

I´m searching for an USB-ADC or toy oscilloscope with the following requirements:
- Bandwidth up to 1MHz horizontally, 12 or better 16 Bit vertically, 10MSamples/s
- at least 10k Samples of internal memory, better 1M or even 1G of memory
- external trigger with low jitter
- at least 2, better 4 channels

- easy to handle digital interface, should be able to be configured and read-out by Python or Labview
- optional: SD-Card interface so that the waveform memory is automatically dumped to a SD-Card with timestamps

What is my motivation: I want a precise utility (--> requirement for 12Bit or more) to dive deeper into signals I pre-checked on the oscilloscope. E.g. a RGB-photodiode array is evaluating the light output of a PWM-controlled spotlight. I´d like to arrange the measurement setup with an ordinary DSO, but then switch to the ADC-box to run some validation runs with on-the-fly evaluation and documentation.

I sometimes read through the offerings of the toy-scopes (Hantek e.g.) but they rarely have more than 8Bit and user reviews often report instabilities or distortions.
What I really woud like is a set of 4ADCs like they are used in DVB-T-Sticks or SDR-Sticks (RTL2832 2.4MHz Bandwidth, 8-Bit resolution) together with a FPGA that does the trigger algorithms and some digital filtering.

Is there potentially some ADC-evalboard that can be used for these tasks? I´m not afraid of low-level-access to the chips, indeed I´d prefer low-level-access to the ADC over any intransparent signal conditioning by the manufacturer. Anyhow I have no experience in FPGA design, so it´d be great if an off-the-shelf module would already have a USB- and maybe SD-Card interface embedded.

Thanks a lot for all constructive comments or ideas!

[BennoG]

Have a look at picoscope, they have up to 16 bit versions wit a lot of memory.

the 4424 has 4 channels 12 bits and 256Msample memory
the 4824 has 8 channels 12 bits and 256Msample memory
the 5442D has 4 channels 16 bit and 128Msample memory


Benno

[2N3055]

Like Benno says, Picoscope 4262 ticks many of the boxes.
Price is not entry level though.

I also have 8ch 4824A. That one is 20MHz, 12 bit.

If you need specific info or a test of something let me know.
I might be able to help if time and my lab capabilities allow..

Best,

[Phil1977]

Thanks a lot so far! 

Thanks also especially for the offer to try in your lab - but I`d need to try with my own system, it´s more or less all about a stable readout interface and a well made ADC path. The price of these units seems absolutely justified, it may already be profitable for a single project and afterwards it surely seems to be a tool worth keeping. As soon as I have one non-abstract testing task for it I´ll order one.

Anyhow, if anyone knows about some kind of ADC-evalboard that´s so cheap you can just buy it to play with it, please mention it here!

[tautech]

Why USB ?
Are you space constrained or just need/want to drive the scope from a PC ?

[egonotto]

Hello,

perhaps AD4630/AD4030 Evaluation Board 24 Bit 2 MSPS?
Or Picoscope 4262 as others have already said?
Or Analog Discovery 3 or Analog Discovery Pro 3000 Serie?

Best regards
egonotto

[Phil1977]

The specs and price of the following board nearly seem to good to be true:

https://www.digikey.de/de/product-highlight/a/analog-devices/ad4630-24-analog-to-digital-converter



I suppose it´s a bad idea to feed the SPI interface with around 200MBit/s directly into a CPU, even if it´s a Raspi4 or state of the art tablet PC. But you can buy the Digilent "ZEDBoard" with a Xilinx and lots of RAM.

It seems you can either get one finished "Picoscope" or two Demosystems for around 2k€.

Thanks a lot, though both is too expensive for "just in case" - I think I just buy 2 of the AD4630 demoboards while available. The "ZEDBoard" seems to eb more of an out-of-the-shelf system.

[Smepic]

Maybe Owon VDS6000A series can be another option:https://www.owon.com.hk/products_owon_vds6000_series_4ch_pc_oscilloscope. Up to 14bits, 10Mpoints, LabView support and not expensive: 2 channel version around 400€, 4 channel 500€.

[Phil1977]

Specs of the OWON seem pretty good... Has anyone an idea how many waveforms it can process per second? I remember of some Hantek that it was good for taking a low rate of long waverforms but anything close to these "digital phosphor" technologies was impossible.

The Picotech 4224 e.g. is specified for 100 000 waveforms per second, but maybe this is one reason why it´s more than twice the price.

Btw, USB is not obligatory for me, e.g. GigE would be fine too. Please no WLAN only

[coromonadalix]

just paid  months ago  3400$ CAd for an pico 3406D  .... witch is enormous,   but practical