Cheap logic analyzer options on the market

[stevenhoneyman]

Anyone got an opinion on the Hantek 4032L? It boasts a couple of GB DDR2 sample memory which seems really rare.
I can only find them to buy from China at the moment so haven't bought one yet (risk with the import tax...)

[mrm2007]

Anyone got an opinion on the Hantek 4032L? It boasts a couple of GB DDR2 sample memory which seems really rare.
I can only find them to buy from China at the moment so haven't bought one yet (risk with the import tax...)

 Hi,

 You can check this thread :

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hantek-ht4032l-logic-analyser/

[stevenhoneyman]

I did, but it's very old and doesn't really come to any conclusions.

[pascal_sweden]

There are only 2 reviews available on Amazon, and they date back from 2013:
https://www.amazon.com/Hantek%C2%AE-4032L-Analyzer-Channels-Memory/dp/B00CG49P90

Both reviews are negative about the software. However, the software could have been improved in the mean time.

It seems that the device is not supported yet by Sigrok:
https://sigrok.org/wiki/Supported_hardware#Logic_analyzers

But they do have some information about it on their page, and somebody might be working on it:
https://sigrok.org/wiki/Hantek_4032L

Moreover, there seems to be an SDK available from Hantek. Could be interesting to look at!
http://www.hantek.com/Product/HT4032/SDK.zip

Actually it might be a good idea, to choose a logic analyzer from the list of Sigrok supported devices:
https://sigrok.org/wiki/Supported_hardware#Logic_analyzers

That is a better strategy. Instead of picking randomly a logic analyzer and hope that it is supported, just pick one that is already supported

[0xdeadbeef]

Then again, as discussed before, "supported" doesn't mean the same as supported with all features or even usable.
Also unless I'm proven otherwise, I'm pretty much sure that the super slow sample based decoding that plagues DSView was inherited from Sigrok.
So unless that was vastly improved (like a speed up by a factor > 100), I consider it nearly useless for large sample buffers (like 100MSamples or more).

[jjoonathan]

My experience with Hantek software is not excellent. I bought a DSO2150 ~7 years ago. Naturally the SW required XP (and did not deal well with compatibility mode), but that's not terribly out of place in the electronics world. They posted updates once every few years, but these had crippling bugs that indicate poor testing, for example they would post binaries linked against the debug versions of .NET libraries so old that you couldn't get them from microsoft and had to resort to sketchy "DLL repair" sites. Crashes, slowdowns, and stutters were not uncommon, and this was a DSO with performance requirements that amounted to drawing a squiggly line a handful of times per second.

Contrast to Saleae, which eats timescale orders-of-magnitude for breakfast and runs like greased lightning on just about every OS/machine combo I've thrown at it.