General > General Technical Chat
Why do you think there aren't more "good" USB oscilloscopes?
james_s:
Well there are niche uses like yours, but I don't think most scope users are in that situation. Personally I find a compact standalone scope more convenient.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: David Aurora on February 17, 2023, 03:58:43 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on February 17, 2023, 03:48:25 am ---USB scopes are a really niche market item. The computer side with the display and whatnot is so cheap these days that there is very little saved in going with the USB form factor that requires you to drag around a computer and deal with cumbersome controls. For around the same price you can get a standalone instrument. I've used USB TE before and have never been impressed, it's less convenient and offers few advantages. Back in the day the promise was cheaper gear by not having to duplicate the processor and display and such but it never really lived up to that promise IMO.
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Speaking for myself, it's not that I'm trying to save a few measly dollars on the screen or power supply or whatever. It's that when I'm called out to a job I already have my laptop with me with a nice big screen and the necessary processing power to run a scope/sig gen/etc, as well as a few bags of tools and test leads and stuff. Carrying less gear helps, especially when parking sucks, there are a million stairs or it's a dodgy area. And it's not just that it saves lugging one scope- it also saves me needing to lug a signal generator, and also an isolation transformer in some cases. Which also means I don't need a power board, extension cables, etc... It all adds up.
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Small tablet scope?
Not a huge amount bigger than a USB scope box and more convenient.
The problem is as others have said, the market for such things is not big. It seems to be either ultra-cheap (Hantek/Owon etc), educational (Analog Discovery), niche like Cleverscope, or pro level modular stuff like Keysigt and others do. Or even the Scopemeter type devices.
You seen to want say a screenless scope equivlent to say a $400 Rigol/Siglent type scope. What's wrong with a Picoscope, isn't that what you want?
peter-h:
From the commercial POV, a USB scope implies "cheap" and the mfg is not able to make a lot of money on it.
Also you need a laptop, and laptops are going out of fashion.
More and more people run their entire life on a phone, which is why those of us who can read and write struggle so much with communicating with so many illiterate people :)
Some use a tablet, which in general doesn't do USB usefully; Apple ones are well crippled like everything from Apple, and while Android are better you still get very limited USB operation. And you get huge OS version dependencies so a USB scope may have a limited life because pretty soon the tablet which works with it exists only on ebay. I use USB endoscopes (borescopes, in aviation) which tend to be chinese made and getting them to work on a particular phone is OK for a year or two... One borescope is now "fixed" to a specific Samsung phone which lives with it in the same box, and I am sure that in a few years that $300 borescope will go in the bin because that phone will die. Tablets are also going out of fashion, with little or no performance development especially in the android sphere. Also, as I well know from aviation use, all modern tablets suffer badly from overheating... get direct sunlight on it and the internal sensor shuts it down at about +45C especially if the charger is connected, and in a DSO usage you will need constant external power. So you have to buy one of those holders which has fans built into it.
Also nobody wants to compete with the chinese; they always pick the low hanging fruit and destroy the market for everybody in the West. The smart thing is to go upmarket. DSOs exploded with cheap 1gsps ADCs which I think are down to $5 now and everybody and their dog in china is churning out DSOs with those ADCs, and if you want to make a DSO with say 5-10gsps then you are spending real money on the ADCs and on other hardware, and making it USB-only just tells potential customers that you are "cheap".
Also a dedicated self contained box is nice to use. I have a Lecroy 3034 here and while the OS is sh*it and slow as a pig, the whole package, with nice knobs, is quite good. I can even access it over RDP (remote desktop) or the LC application can run over a VPN (poorly but usably). That scope was about 5k and it will work for many years. Well... it blew up after 1 year and got fixed under warranty but has been ok since; I leave it running 24/7 ;)
tautech:
--- Quote from: peter-h on February 17, 2023, 08:10:25 am ---I have a Lecroy 3034 here and while the OS is sh*it and slow as a pig, the whole package, with nice knobs, is quite good. I can even access it over RDP (remote desktop) or the LC application can run over a VPN (poorly but usably).
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Oh, an early SDS3000 rebrand. Yes they were treacle slow according to complaints but the one I briefly used at Siglent HQ in 2014 seemed fine.
The latest version SDS3000X with a Xilinx processor upgrade is apparently much better but like the SDS3000 models only available to the west as a LeCroy.
David Hess:
--- Quote from: Gyro on February 16, 2023, 06:03:22 pm ---The cheap screens on desktop scopes is something that I still don't get. They seem to have poor resoulutions compared to what you can get out of a tablet screen for instance. Even at 2 channels, with all the menu and readout stuff around the edges you're lucky to get 6 bit resolution on a 2 channel scope, let alone a 4 channel. Is it just cheaping out or lack of processing power?
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It could be, especially since producing the display for a higher resolution and depth screen would lower the peak number of acquisitions per second. Which sounds better for marketing, 40,000 acquisitions per second or 10,000 with a higher definition screen that looks practically the same?
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