Products > Test Equipment
Picoscope- yay or nay?
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David Aurora:
I threw one of these in my element 14 order the other day as a bit of an experiment (long story short- I just bought a Tektronix 576 and it arrived with a smashed CRT, so I've been using various scopes to probe the CRT driver section and test the unit without the CRT. Then I saw that Picoscope lets you do custom probe scaling and has a 10x10 grid like the original CRT and figured this may be a decent temporary solution to get a roughly calibrated approximation of the 576 display)

And yeah, it's been a goddamn train wreck. I'm using an M1 MacBook Pro and it works fine on that side as far as hardware connection, but only with beta software. The catch of course is that it seems like ALL the Mac software they've ever released has been labelled beta, so I suspect there's no proper version coming. And the beta version doesn't do XY, amongst other quirks, so it's useless to me.

Fired up Parallels, no go there (from what I gather the issue is x86 emulation stuff so probably not Picos fault? I don't know, I use a Mac so I'm used to things just working without having to screw around under the hood).

Checked their forum and it's basically just tumbleweeds, lot's of similar questions but no answers.

So yeah, I'm just wondering if people are actually successfully using their stuff without having to write their own software, or if these boxes are more gimmicks for kids that enjoy writing code?
Marco:

--- Quote from: David Aurora on May 07, 2022, 12:28:31 am ---or if these boxes are more gimmicks for kids that enjoy writing code?

--- End quote ---
That's being a bit harsh on M1 Macbooks.
moore:

We had a couple that worked fine at my last workplace, 10 years ago.  They are pretty good if you are going to transfer the waveforms anyway in my opinion, or if you have to do something with a laptop for whatever reason.  Software worked fine on PCs.  Macs are frankly always doomed and have been since about 1993 for interfacing to engineering type hardware.  They kept changing the processor, buses interface and OS abstraction layers and all the hardware companies (like NI - LabVIEW started on Mac for pete's sake) just gave up.   Wasn't worth it for 10% market share.  I can get a PC today with RS232 still, piece of cake....

Anyway, point being a new Pico plugged into a Windows laptop I'm sure would work fine out of the box.  We also traded emails with Pico's people and they were helpful, but took a couple of days typically (UK, so overnight from Americas/Asia at least).
jasonRF:
I’ve used one under Windows for a half dozen years, with several different computers, and the picoscope 6 software works great.  The new picoscope 7 software that is under development works okay too, but I don’t like it as much so haven’t used much at all.

Perhaps they don’t support other operating systems very well?

David Aurora:
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.
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