My company wants to buy an oscilloscope. The scope that meets our needs is around $7,000. I am sure we can save much money if we buy a PC-based unit, like Picoscope. Do you have experience with PC based scopes? Do you recommend them for serious work?
I don't really like them, no matter what the spec. It ties up a PC, for one thing. It makes it super non-portable. Just too many 'bits' floating about.
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We are developing a board with a DSP, some logic, and some analog circuitry. The scope will be used to debug the circuit, make sure signals are clean, make sure timing is correct. We should get a 4-channel 350 MHz scope, yet these start at $7,000. So, I thought maybe a PC-based scope would do the job for less money. I do not know, I never used PC-based scopes.
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I've used Picoscope but I think they are crappy. There is no peak-detection which makes high frequency signals dissapear at low sweep rates. The number of sweeps (screen updates) is around 3 or 4 per second. Way too slow. And their software crashes every now and then.
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Those are things you need to think about before you even commit to making a board. The scope won't help you if you do major mistakes in the design from the start. You need to simulate stuff before, never mind the scope.
They just aren't convenient, ideally, you want something small so it can easily be moved from lab to lab to thermal chamber etc. battery powered is even better.
I've used a few different PC based scopes and some regular Tektronix standalone scopes as well. The PC based scopes are fine as long as you understand their limitations and are prepared to work around them.
Advantages of PC based scopes:
- Low cost
- Smaller box
- Much larger screen
- Longer recording length (on some models)
- Easy saving & exporting of the captured waveforms
Disadvantages:
- Slow screen updates
- No peak detection on the cheaper models
- Might limit your choice of PC operating system
- Not very portable
One model that I have used is this one:
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It's a DSO, logic analyzer, and waveform generator all in one. It's only 80 MS/s but for $500 you can't expect much more. I've actually found myself using the digital waveform generators on this thing quite often.
Most low to medium end PC based DSO's are all a similar sample rate, i.e. a few hundred MHz. Because they all use off-the-shelf FPGA's and memories in their design, and that's about as high as you can go cheaply. When you start talking 1GS/s+ you are into the high end domain of the big manufacturers of professional oscolloscopes.
Agilent make a PC based DSO that might suit you if you *really* want a PC based scope:
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200MHz, 1GS/s, 32Mpoint memory, $1600
Stop being cheap, you *need* at least one real bench scope for your lab, even if it's a lower end mixed signal scope like a Rigol:
I have a SDS 200A from softDSP. The windows software is crap. The FFT feature is basically unusable. The triggering is unreliable. The claim of a
200MHz bandwidth is blather, they do 'statistical sampling', which is basically adding in some random jitter to the sample clock and correlating it somehow.
OTOH, the unit is small enough to go with your laptop in the same case, and is useful therefore as an onsite scope. It can store a fairly large buffer, and allows the possibility of doing things like line monitoring with a very slow signal (like 1s per division).
It was also very cheap, less than $1k.
I'm not sure I'd buy it again. It does have an SDK (for $200 extra) that allows the possibility of doing special kinds of monitoring with a custom display.
I have also used the PicoScopes. The update is not as the other poster says, I think I have like at least 50 times per second.( on a USB 1.0 connection)
That being said, some of the SW is buggy. But I live with that. The great thing is that my 12bit scope can be programmed and I can then use it for a test system also and even better when it is connected to the PC the documentation of measurements are a charm.
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