Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the replies. Very interesting read. I deliberately didn't reply sooner in the thread as I didn't want to distract, or alter the discussion.
Let me clarify some points.
Whilst the project would be fully open sourced, it is not something that you would be knocking up on your bench with your trusty soldering iron. The components required for this build will require professional assembly. Most of those people interested in developing an open source scope would be expected to purchase their hardware - the community driven aspect would mainly be an FPGA Firmware and Software project, with the hardware development done by a few people with the correct skills, taking their input from the community ideas & suggestions.
The tools used for the schematic and PCB layout will be high end tools rather than open source tools. I don't see much of a problem with this as few people could manufacture their own boards, or stomach the costs of a single board quantity production run. Even if you could; unless your proposed PCB changes are very minor, the work in redesigning the PCB is often not far off that when starting from fresh.
Purists may take offence with this, but plenty of very popular hardware is not user manufacturable, and PCB either not released or done in high end tools - Raspberry Pi for example.
Calibration, and the suitability of the project as a tool has been questioned. Well, initial calibration would be done in the factory at assembly time, and subsequent calibrations would be done in the same manner as any other piece of equipment. You send it off to a calibration house and they follow the calibration guide. The project is intended as just that... A PROJECT! It isn't intended to replace a trusted commercial scope, but to provide an insight in to the inner workings of such. Perhaps eventually when / if the project matures it could...
Some question my ability to produce such hardware. As I said in the OP, I am a professional engineer. I design PCBs and program FPGAs (big ones) as my day job using cutting edge technology including USB 3.0 / DDR3 / DDR4 / Ethernet / HDMI / FPGAs (
Multiple Xilinx Virtex 7 2000Ts). The hardest part of the project for me will be the analogue performance of the front end to achieve 200MHz. Where I lack in skill is PC side software design, but there are a lot of people in the world who are very adept it PC software. My shortcoming in that area is one of the reasons I want to do it.
My reason for the OP was to gauge whether this is something that I open source and try to build in to something bigger, or whether I simply build two of three for myself. In order to get the cost down to something reasonable such as sub $500USD; it would need to be made in volume batches. In order to do that a Kickstarter project would need to be done so that one hundred+ boards (I just plucked that figure - not done the BOM yet) could be built at the same time. Setting up a Kickstarter project would be a lot of extra work, and it would alter the design significantly compared to keeping it to myself. Hence my OP.
The output of a Kickstarter project would be a complete, cased, tested and calibrated, network data acquisition device as per specs in OP (supply your own probes though most likely). The software and FPGA code would come as part of the community project development.
At the moment I don't think that there is enough enthusiasm to warrant a Kickstarter project.
Thanks
-Tim