Likewise, the Tsunami can be used to measure signals. The processor used in Arduinos has a good quality ADC, but it's slow, being limited to 15k samples per second. We've bypassed that limitation, equipping the Tsunami with a high speed comparator, allowing it to measure frequency, a peak detector, allowing it to measure signal amplitude, and a phase detector allowing it to, er, detect phase. All of these facilities work up to nearly 8 megahertz.
Too bad the measuring part isn't really that fast. I would love a device like this with way better measuring frequency. Having to use it trough the Arduino IDE also limits it's usability a bit in my opinion, although for the price you're not really allowed to complain.
Are there similar devices with better specs that aren't extremely expensive?
I'm the creator of the Tsunami.
In principle, the peak detection will work above 8MHz, though you'd have to adjust the lowpass filter on the input if you want decent amplitude, and eventually you'd run into the limits of the 100MHz opamp. Frequency counting is limited to just under 8MHz because that's the fastest the AVR can count. And phase measurement is relative to the generated sinewave, so it's limited to that speed.
Of course, you're welcome to write your code in AVR C instead of in the Arduino IDE - in fact, I intend to port the libraries to standalone AVR versions, and just write wrappers for use in Arduino. It's quite likely that the "official" firmware that uses most of the capabilities as a test and measurement device, will be a 'bare' AVR-C program.
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