EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: unknown_h on June 18, 2021, 01:29:55 pm
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I feel like I am chasing something that doesn't exists, and my ability to google has failed me so I am turning to the collective brain trust on here. Is anyone aware of any lower cost PXI, PCI or or other modular test equipment form factor oscilloscope? I am not looking for something with amazing abilities and I am aware that USB oscilloscope exist( mostly without proper grounding) I just don't want to have to deal with tones of usb cables and would prefer to have have a single chassis for all my test equipment with a single interface for my computer.
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I haven't seen too many PCI-E oscilloscopes that I would call "cheap." Over the years at my job, I've bought ones from Gage, National Instruments, Acqiris and AlazarTech. All of them were several thousand dollars plus.
On the other hand, with an embedded scope card in a computer, you have to worry about 1) isolation (so you don't blow up your computer), 2) noise/interference from the PC itself, 3) lower quality power supply in the PC feeding the scope, etc. I'm sure the good scope cards take care of these issues and that's why the prices are a bit high for the casual user.
You might expand your search to include PCI/PXI digitizer cards. Most of them come with a demo-like scope application. Obviously, the cost of the digitizer is a function of number of channels, sample rate, number of bits, max bandwidth, etc.
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I think pretty much all this sort of stuff has gone USB, and IMO it makes sense. If you want a PC based scope, just use USB, it's only one cable. If you want an all-in-one box, buy a standalone oscilloscope, a lot of higher end ones are PCs inside anyway.