Products > Test Equipment
Picoscope- yay or nay?
jasonRF:
--- Quote from: David Aurora on May 07, 2022, 03:37:33 am ---Set it up on another machine (an Intel Mac Mini running boot camp).
Can confirm this thing is hot garbage. Ugh. The clunkiness is straight out of 2003.
Like, OK, sure, you could probably probe an Arduino blink program and see a pulse, cool. Dunno what else you could do with this without wanting to stab someone though.
--- End quote ---
It seems that a picoscope is the wrong tool for you.
Are you able to return it? If not, it shouldn’t be too hard to sell it and recoup most of your investment.
Jason
bdunham7:
--- Quote from: David Aurora on May 07, 2022, 05:23:43 am ---Literally all I wanted to do was plug it into a modern computer and look at signals in XY mode, I didn't think that was a huge ask ;D
--- End quote ---
"I've never done it before and I don't know how, but it should be easy, right?"
Having done this (extracted and viewed vector video signals from devices with broken CRTs) I can tell you that it is never quite that simple and the results are 'good enough' at best.
Doing it with an analog CRT scope, you need X,Y and Z inputs, otherwise you'll have garbage all over the screen. For whatever reason, the best instrument I've found for this is a Tek 22xx series scope, using a second scope with an output to monitor and scale the Z input.
Doing it with any DSO is an order of magnitude harder. First off, if you don't have a Z input, your results will be terrible at best--and Z inputs are not common. And then when you have mixed vector displays--traces combined with character generators, getting the optimum record length is, well, impossible. Too long and your display update rate is useless. Too short and you lose part of the display during the blind time. And as far as I've ever been able to determine, there's no sweet spot in the middle. Ugh.
Don't blame your Picoscope. There's lots of happy Picoscope users out there, but I guarantee you they aren't doing vector graphics on an M1 MacBook. A netbook with Wndows XP SP3 is more like it.
boyddotee:
Have to say Yay, they have saved my toot on many occasions out in the field. Wouldn't use them in the office so to speak as the software has always been a bit jank. Mac support is another matter I've no familiarity with, but up win10 it's worked for me.
BeBuLamar:
I only have the cheapest one they made a 2 channel 10Mhz one. The software works well enough. One thing I don't like about it is that I can set the 0 off center on the vertical axis.
pigrew:
The PicoScope 6 GUI works pretty well for me on Windows, so yay. That said, their software API (PicoSDK) feels like it's straight out of the 90s and was a fair pain to use.
The scopes are great for portable debugging (e.g., automotive tech), and to some extent automated testing. However, I still like the physical knobs of a bench oscilloscope.
The only other comparable product I've used is the Digilent Analog Discovery 2. The PicoScope has better hardware, but the AD2's GUI is more comfortable to use.
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