just because in the old days people learned electronics without an oscilloscope does not mean you shoul ddo that now. yes it can be done , but why deny yourself the insigt that the avaialble machinery can give you ?
How did people get to work before there were cars ?
how did people eat soup before there were spoons ?
how did people stay warm before they developed the knowledge to make, maintain and transport fire ?
Hands up if you are old enough to have used an oscilloscope with a 'stability' control!
When I was a senior in high school an uncle gave me a Tek 212. it was later stolen and I was scopeless until this year when I found two different Tektronix 2200 series for $40 and $50 so now I use one and my son uses one.
It wasn't until the very late '60s that it became possible for hobbyists to experiment with digital systems. I'm not sure when RTL was introduced to the hobbyist but I ran across it in 1969. Prior to that time, flops were built up from transistors and there was some kind of limit to the types of projects hobbyists could build. Perhaps a CPU was out of the question.
Once we started playing with logic, the requirement for tools increased (in my view) in that a logic probe was a minimal requirement and a scope wasn't far behind. By '75 or so, microcomputers were becoming available at the hobby level and the speeds were so fast that a logic probe didn't provide much information. Sure, a signal blipped but when? About '79 or so, I built a floppy disk controller for my Altair 8800 using a Western Digital 1771 controller chip. That project REQUIRED a scope!
And, in my view, digital projects have ever since.
Some time around '75, I built a Pong game from the original logic diagrams. That project used 66 integrated circuits (more or less) and the wire-wrapping was considerable. I think I got by with an old Dumont scope and a logic probe. I'd have to wait 45 years to get my first DSO...
Heathkit projects could be built without test equipment and, where testing was required, the device itself became the test equipment. I think that was the case for the color television kit. I never built one. I just built an audio amplifier (late '50s) and the power supply, VTVM and VOM in the late '60s.
For checking signal integrity, yes. For checking embedded system program function printf() and LEDs are still very useful, and a multimeter can be used to determine things such as mean spare time in a processing loop.
Things are so much easier with a modern scope! And I do know how I got along without it!
I almost never used debugging features. My first thing to do is to get LED to blink, then UART. For some chips without float printf support, I will also port a float to char* function.
To measure CPU usage and interrupt performance, a scope with some IO toggling is enough. Profilers are just bloated marketing features IMHO.
just because in the old days people learned electronics without an oscilloscope does not mean you shoul ddo that now. yes it can be done , but why deny yourself the insigt that the avaialble machinery can give you ?
How did people get to work before there were cars ?
how did people eat soup before there were spoons ?
how did people stay warm before they developed the knowledge to make, maintain and transport fire ?
just because in the old days people learned electronics without an oscilloscope does not mean you shoul ddo that now. yes it can be done , but why deny yourself the insigt that the avaialble machinery can give you ?
Keep in mind the OP is in Malaysia. Asian wage standard is about 0.05x to 0.5x of western standard, depending on countries. When I was a kid, I dream of having my scope for years, and I didn't get mine till I was 19, when I got my Owon scope which I kept till this day. I didn't get a decent western brand scope till I turned 23.
Not sure how much money average Malaysians make, but in China, for a normal, common family, we make ~$1k per month per family, and in China you have to pay averagely ~$200k for an apartment, which means, for a young couple, even if their parents paid half of their house for them, they still have to work hard and save every penny in their first 20 years after marrying to pay for their house.
Spending $400 on a hobby toy is way to much for average Chinese young man, and I do not think in Malaysia this pressure is much low either.
Hands up if you are old enough to have used an oscilloscope with a 'stability' control!
I had one of those Heathkit oscilloscopes when I was like 12 but I did not really understand how to use it.
Two hands up if you *still* have an oscilloscope with a stability control and have used it! (Tektronix 545)When I was a senior in high school an uncle gave me a Tek 212. it was later stolen and I was scopeless until this year when I found two different Tektronix 2200 series for $40 and $50 so now I use one and my son uses one.
SO: Uh, whose oscilloscope is that in the living room?
Me: Mine. Tektronix 2232. The oscilloscope I've always wanted and now I have it. I rule!
And then there is the CP/M incantation of DEBUG. I remember many wasted hours single-stepping through somebody else's code. What a colossal waste of time!
Core dumps are another nightmare especially if the underlying CPU lacked a stack and self-modifying code was 'normal'. The IBM 1130 comes to mind...
How about single-stepping an FPGA CPU? It was easier with a 32 bit logic analyzer. Since Digilent has gone all-in on PMOD connectors and eliminated the large headers, this has been getting more difficult. One thing a 32 bit analyzer does is make you wish for a 64 bit analyzer. This is particularly true if the FSA is using one-hot encoding. It takes a fair number of bits to figure out what state you're in!
Regrettably, printf() doesn't work well for FPGA projects. Or it's just a whole lot more difficult!
And then there is the CP/M incantation of DEBUG. I remember many wasted hours single-stepping through somebody else's code. What a colossal waste of time!
Core dumps are another nightmare especially if the underlying CPU lacked a stack and self-modifying code was 'normal'. The IBM 1130 comes to mind...
How about single-stepping an FPGA CPU? It was easier with a 32 bit logic analyzer. Since Digilent has gone all-in on PMOD connectors and eliminated the large headers, this has been getting more difficult. One thing a 32 bit analyzer does is make you wish for a 64 bit analyzer. This is particularly true if the FSA is using one-hot encoding. It takes a fair number of bits to figure out what state you're in!
Regrettably, printf() doesn't work well for FPGA projects. Or it's just a whole lot more difficult!Nice thing about FPGAs is you can build whatever test gear you need right on the chip!
Nice thing about FPGAs is you can build whatever test gear you need right on the chip!
So I built a kit multimeter and a kit oscilloscope. I still use the same oscilloscope today.
Do you mean the scope, along with all electrolytic caps, as well as tube filament and phosphor, worked for 54+ years???
Money is always an issue!