Products > Test Equipment

True analog scopes

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BillyO:
Here's a little use case for a CRO.

Just a few minutes ago I had a tiny epiphany about something I'm working on and I just wanted to check a signal.  No precise measurement, just wanted to verify it was there and looked like it should.  I went down to the lab, turned on the Tek 465, got a probe and attached it to the scope then to the DUT, twiddled the vertical and the horizontal, saw what I wanted to see, turned off my scope  and put the probe away.  All in about 1/2 the time it would take the SDS2104XP just to boot.

H713:
Everyone has a slightly different workflow and slightly different preferences when it comes to tools.

Some engineers, when setting up their lab, have both a DSO and an analog scope on their bench. Some will have multiple of each. Others will have just a DSO.

Some engineers will use a DSO for everything, while others will use an analog scope for some tasks and a digital scope for others. It's all an issue of personal preferences, workflow, bench space, etc.

This is no different from other industries. Some people still like to have a console in their recording studio, others do everything in-the-box. Some woodworkers use planes and chisels extensively, others choose to do everything with power tools. Neither way is "better", just different.

I think we can agree that only having an analog scope is a real limitation these days, but there are still valid reasons to have both - even if those reasons are as dumb as "adding some variety".


Why aren't they still made? Easy. DSOs with LCDs are objectively better for most applications, but more importantly, are far, far cheaper to produce and easier to make into a sexy form factor that is easy to sell. Doesn't mean there aren't valid reasons to use an analog scope, but it does mean that the market for new analog scopes is too small to justify the cost to produce them. CRTs are difficult and expensive to manufacture. I believe that there are some companies still making CRTs for maintaining legacy systems (military, aviation, etc) with long lifecycles, but we're talking very small numbers.

Njk:

--- Quote from: markone on December 18, 2022, 07:58:49 pm ---To finalize, current tech state of real time embedded real time has nothing to do with 8bit era.

--- End quote ---
Guys, take it easy. I recalled, when my daughter just graduated from the university (she decided to pursue an engineering career despite my objections), I asked her to pass my exam. Short time before I installed a new electricity meter that has IR interface, and I was interested in getting data from that meter in a high-tech style way. The protocol is not IrDA and not plain IEC 61107 (or how it is called now), it's a vendor-specific combination of the IrDA optical transceiver part with a pulse-based protocol like that used in remote controls.

So I asked her to design a PSK/FSK modem that convert that protocol to UART. To simplify the task, I bought a USB IrDA adapter, removed everything except the IR part and the USB bridge, and installed a cheapest Microchip PIC part between them (very basic 8-bit MCU with internal RC oscillator). She had just to write the "firmware".

For me, it was a simple task as I've done many things like that in late 80s. To show that it's doable, I'd implemented it over a couple of weekends. Worked just fine. BTW, analog scope was successfully used in the process. It's quite a real-time embedded application, isn't it?

Sadly, the exam was spectacularly failed. And the stuff becomes more and more complex over the years. I wonder who eventually will be able to do it with clear understanding of what he/she is doing.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: Njk on December 19, 2022, 08:26:38 am ---And the stuff becomes more and more complex over the years. I wonder who eventually will be able to do it with clear understanding of what he/she is doing.

--- End quote ---

That's an interesting topic.

Certainly I agree with you in that the sheer complexity of modern digital components, languages and libraries and frameworks means learning them is a significant cliff to climb. Too many people don't understand the limitations of their tools and/or don't look any deeper than the sales brochure or top-level description.

How can that be minimised? The best technique is a good education that is focussed on the underlying fundamentals of the topics that will remain valid as technology changes. It is only an exception person that can pick up such concepts solely "on the job"; I've come across one.

In contrast a bad education wastes too much time on the current fads which usually have a half-life of <5 years. Too many people have only a surface understanding of the tools and technology they are using. They can still be useful in many circumstances, but often they don't recognise how much they don't know.

On the other hand, I'm sure people were saying the same things 50 years ago about the technologies in use then. Certainly I remember doing practice maths exam papers from the early 50s, and thinking the questions were bloody hard!

nctnico:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on December 19, 2022, 09:58:59 am ---In contrast a bad education wastes too much time on the current fads which usually have a half-life of <5 years. Too many people have only a surface understanding of the tools and technology they are using. They can still be useful in many circumstances, but often they don't recognise how much they don't know.

On the other hand, I'm sure people were saying the same things 50 years ago about the technologies in use then. Certainly I remember doing practice maths exam papers from the early 50s, and thinking the questions were bloody hard!

--- End quote ---
This is getting off-topic...
Old people do tend to get stuck in the past where 'everything was better'. But I have to agree that the quality of education has dropped significantly. A lot of people can get a bachelor's degree nowadays but only because the bar has been set to 50% to what it was -says- 30 years ago. My youngest son is studying software engineering at a bachelor's degree level. Much to my surprise they don't get any math lessons. When I bring it up he claims he'll just look it up on internet. Then I counter with: how do you know what to look for? I get no answer... I'm not going to claim I remember everything I was told during math lessons (I have two books covering all topics and those are 5cm thick each printed on really thin paper).

I also worked on software written by self-thaught programmers. In one case I asked the guy on how he got to a certain formula (partly implemented using ifs for different input ranges). His answer: I just fudged the numbers until the result looks OK. So I asked: and what if the input data is not what you expect, how to raise an error or make sure to show the result is obviously wrong? The guy answered with a shoulder shrug. FFS  :palm: Needless to say I replaced his crap with a single -continuous- formula that worked.

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