Electronics > Beginners
Purchased an oscilloscope but did I make a mistake? (re: newbie + Arduino, etc)
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james_s:
A scope is one of those things where when you need one, there is no substitute. In most cases *any* scope is better than none at all, without one you are flying blind. As I think I mentioned already, the most important thing is learning how to use it, great things have been accomplished with rather terrible scopes and a little creativity. The modern low cost DSOs are massively better than just about anything on the market a few decades ago.
tggzzz:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 14, 2018, 06:12:39 pm ---As I think I mentioned already, the most important thing is learning how to use it, great things have been accomplished with rather terrible scopes and a little creativity.

--- End quote ---

Precisely; as per the aphorism in my .Sig :)
IDEngineer:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 14, 2018, 06:12:39 pm ---great things have been accomplished with rather terrible scopes and a little creativity
--- End quote ---
An excellent observation! Remember, what we scoff at as "junk" today would have been witchcraft even as recently as the 70's and 80's. Yet we were building microwave communication gear, landing men on the moon, etc. despite the "limitations" of the test equipment of those eras. Ever look into what they called "storage scopes" back then? Camera hoods on CRT scopes... hyper-complex CRT bottles with lots of weird grids, strange phosphors, etc. A minor miracle some of that stuff could even be physically manufactured, let alone in any volume, but that was the only option back when they didn't have ultrafast monolithic flash A/D's and ASIC/FPGA to handle the resulting bandwidth to memory - or even that much memory, at the necessary speeds!

If someone handed you a spec sheet for one of those scopes today, you'd dismiss it as worthless. Yet much of what we take for granted technologically today is BASED on things accomplished with such tools. That's why I'm slow to say that an older, or less capable, piece of R&D equipment has no value. Most of us don't usually work on projects where we need, or can tell, the difference between an 8-bit and a 10-bit A/D scope... or a 0.001% DMM... or a power supply with under 50uV of noise.

I have an Agilent Cell Test unit, a sort of all-in-one box that includes a scope, spectrum analyzer, sweep signal generator, demodulator, etc. Everything tops out at about 1GHz because it was meant for the days of analog cell service. Its original price was $40-60K depending upon configuration, it was state of the art, and my HP buddies tell me they sold thousands of them. Today its specs are dated but guess what - physics hasn't changed so it can do just as good a job today as when it was SOTA. I'm not tossing it out just because there's something better out there.

Back in the late 70's while in high school I paid $1400 for my Phillips PM3214 25MHz dual trace delayed timebase scope. Thanks to inflation a dollar then was worth a whole lot more than a dollar today, and yet today the OP purchased twice the bandwidth, twice the channels, with storage and memory, far more flexible and better triggering, probably 2/3rds less weight and volume, for about one-fifth the numeric dollars and even fewer adjusted dollars. And 50MHz probably covers 75% of the projects discussed on this site! Freakin' remarkable.

What I'm trying to say is "terrible" is a relative term. "Terrible" today was the bleeding edge a few years ago!
rstofer:

--- Quote from: IDEngineer on June 14, 2018, 09:21:04 pm ---And 50MHz probably covers 75% of the projects discussed on this site! Freakin' remarkable.

--- End quote ---

And there probably isn't a DS1054Z that hasn't been unlocked to 100 MHz.  The OPs scope will come with all the features except bandwidth and it won't be long before he Googles 'riglol' and fixes that.

It's an amazing piece of equipment for the price.
IDEngineer:

--- Quote from: rstofer on June 14, 2018, 10:02:41 pm ---And there probably isn't a DS1054Z that hasn't been unlocked to 100 MHz.  The OPs scope will come with all the features except bandwidth and it won't be long before he Googles 'riglol' and fixes that.
--- End quote ---
Another good point. Seriously, four channels of 100MHz for $300. The rest of the specs almost don't matter at that price. I've spent far more for a portable scope, for business trips, that has FAR less bandwidth, much poorer user interface, and frankly isn't all that much smaller. Toss this sucker in a TEquipment padded shoulder bag and away you go.

I wonder what the power supply looks like, and how difficult it would be to power it from a LiPo pack for truly portable operation. Would be nice to skip the whole AC inverter stage and just present DC to the scope. Maybe its power supply is (semi) modular and could be removed to make room for a LiPo right in the case, perhaps with a one-off PCB to generate the original output voltages. Cut an XT30 connector into the side for recharging.

I might have to pick up one of these things just to tear into it and turn it into the ultimate road warrior scope. How can you go wrong for $300?!?

EDIT: Just checked Dave's teardown at to get a view of the power supply, and sure enough at 12:00 he openly wonders if the power supply could be swapped out for some sort of battery replacement. There's MORE than enough room in there, far more than I expected. Has anyone pursued this? I'd much rather buy than build if someone has already taken the trouble....
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