| Products > Test Equipment |
| USB logic analyzer - what's the current "favorite" for ~150$? Hantek 4032L? |
| (1/12) > >> |
| toli:
Hi All, I was looking into possibly extending the capabilities of my gear when it comes to a logic analyzer. Since this will eventually be used mainly for hobby use, I'd like to keep it at ~150$ or less. My "must haves" include 16 channels, samples rate of >100MSPS, and adjustable threshold level (some of the things I use don't have "standard" logic levels), a couple Mpoints of memory are also very much appreciated. If I'm being picky, I would actually like to get >200MSPS sample rate, more than 16 channels, and it would make my life easier for some use cases to be able to use external clock for sampling. I will use it mostly as a general purpose device for SPI/I2C/RS232/similar simple interfaces I might use in projects. However, having a more capable device will allow me to use it for reading data out of test chips I'm working on as part of my Ph.D. studies. While I do have tools to do this at the university, having a small device at home that can allow me to work on this whenever I want is a great advantage. One candidate I'm currently looking at is the Hantek 4032L. Its almost within budget, it has 32channel, 64Mpoints per channel, 400MSPS, adjustable voltage levels, and supports (in latest fw) external clock for sampling. From what I read the software is ok at best, but it seems to be well supported (and improving over time) by PulseView which is a great point in its favor (I could perhaps implement additional decoding here instead of MATLAB like I'm doing today). After this long intro, about time I get to the questions :) 1 - I've seen limited number of user reviews of the 4032L, and the few I've seen are from a few years ago. Are there any users of this device here on the forum that can share their experience with the device/provide real world opinion about it? Is it any good? Are there any major bugs/limitations? Anything else I should be aware of before getting one? 2 - Are there other suggested devices that are considered better/will fit my needs better? Thank you. |
| maginnovision:
If you don't need the 32 channels I'd say get something with better support. If you do want to get the 4032 you need to use sigrok or write your own program for anything other than basic decoding. I'm torn on sigrok, it's missing alot of things I need but the 4032 developer is doing what he can with the driver. The factory software is sufficient for individual lines or parallel busses. The advanced triggers are the reason I still use it. The software is pretty much unusable in 4K though. Overall, I'd say it's good but first and third party software have their issues. If you have any specific questions I can try to answer them. |
| TK:
You can check the Zeroplus LAP-C 16032... it has only 16 channels, 100MSa/s and 32K per channel but it supports over 100 protocols included for free. Price in the US is around $130 |
| 1anX:
I got the DSLogic Plus and it does what I want! http://www.dreamsourcelab.com/order.html Check the thread on this forum. |
| toli:
Thank you all for the comments. maginnovision, assuming I will be using sigrok, what are the issues you are seeing with this combo? From what I read the current version supports external clock, and has most of the features implemented already, or am I wrong? Where do you feel it falls short compared to other options? One more thing has to do with operating it on an external clock. Any idea how fast this clock can actually be? I see this mode is much slower for most devices, but I can't see a note of this mode in the spec for the Hantek. TK, 32KB is just not enough for me unfortunately. There are some cases where I need a few MB. 100Msa/s are also the bare minimum I can get away with for some applications. So if I can get stronger HW for the price I will definitely go that way. 1anX, from what I read about it, the SW is based on sigrok too, and therefore has many similarities. If that is the case, will it actually be any better than using sigrok on the 4032L? The reason I'm asking is because when comparing the spec, its a stronger unit (the Hantek). More channels, higher sample rate, and more memory. For instance, I now have a project where the output is 12bit parallel bus (actually 32, but I can get away with 12 at a time) + 50MHz sample clock. For this the DSlogic is running at the edge of what it can do, although it does seem to support this. For this I has to implement the readout using a Cypress FX3 EVB. While it wasn't too bad, if I could simply hook it up to a LA and dump a few MB's per channel into a csv file - it would have been even faster and easier. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |