Not many people make benchtop counter/timers these days.
The base Agilent and Tek units are around $2500. There are a few cheap Instek and such, generally not interfaced. It doesn't seem that hard to do, compared to oscilloscopes and such.
Not many people make benchtop counter/timers these days.
The base Agilent and Tek units are around $2500. There are a few cheap Instek and such, generally not interfaced. It doesn't seem that hard to do, compared to oscilloscopes and such.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement
I looked for a replacement for my 5370B's last year (not that there was/is anything wrong with them, but it would be nice to have a smaller unit). I couldn't find anything with the same feature set, so ended up buying another 5370B (for peanuts) as a potential donor unit.
We still use a few 5370Bs, but they are old and dying. The Agilent
53230A is pretty close, for around $4K. 5370 was an amazing box. It has a 6800 8-bit 1 MHz nmos uP, barely enough to run a toaster oven. Somebody hacked some really good code.Whoever programmed the 53230A must not have ever used a 5370, because they did some really dumb things.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement
A market opportunity awaits, then?
For $13 you can get an eight digit frequency counter module from China.
eBay item number:
171922301598But no one seems to sell a universal counter/timer at anything close to this price.
Dan
Poul-Henning Kamp did a nice replacement for the 5370 cpu card based on a beagleboard black
I preferred the Phillips/Fluke 6681R.
How can they sell that for $12 and ship it for 99 cents?
I need counters to go in test racks. Programmable trigger level, period, averaging, pulse widths, stuff like that, plus a USB or Ethernet interface. And a pretty good timebase.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement
Hah, and the cheap ones play with the statics a bit too. We built our own, but I don't want to sell any. (Besides other things the firmware stinks, and I had to build in a ~200ns pulse stretcher.)
George H.
This one is pretty good- they upped the price considerably since I last used one- seems there should be a simpler box with a usb to replace all those panel controls and localized analysis- no need to make it standalone these days.
Am 24.03.2016 um 21:56 schrieb John Larkin:
I have replaced my 5370 with a Stanford SR620. I like it. Just the fan is unpleasant.
BTW Someone has made a replacement CPU card for the 5370 based on a BeagleBoneBlack. I think I saw that on the time nuts list.
regards, Gerhard
I don't know about the $12, but I suspect the American US mail users are subsidizing the rest of the shipping costs. I don't think I could ship anything from California to Florida for 99 cents, but somehow the Chinese do.
Mikek
I am sure you are right. I browse the internet and buy for the grand child ren inexpensive items that might encourage their interest in science. An ex ample is ph indicator strips. $.34 gor a hundred strips. I have things se nt directly to my neice in Alaska as I could not mail them to her for 34 ce nts.
I will be doing that with a kit to build a free running multivibrator that flashes a couple of LED's. 44 cents including shipping.
Dan
The SRS stuff is OK, but the user interfaces are ancient and terrible. Someone should tell them about LCDs and spinner knobs. Their 2 GHz clock generator is good, except for a zone of weirdness around 700 MHz.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Yeah, it's getting old, serial and GPIB, and it's $5K. We'll probably go with the Agilent 53210A, around $2K. It has USB and Ethernet.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
How does Raspberry Pi sell a computer board for $5?
A Raspberry Pi Zero/2/3, a display module, an FPGA, some analog front end circuit and a good timebase. The rest is just code. Mounting it in a rack will drive the cost up considerably because of the expense of the case.
-- Rick
They don't, at the moment, which they claim is due to teething problems with scaling their in-house production line. We'll see.
I'm doing a RPi-powered instrument right now.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
I have a 5372B, but rarely use it because setting it up is such a pain. Is the 5370 easier to use?
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant
It's a pleasure to use manually. All the buttons on the front panel make sense and make satisfying clicks. If you want to show the mean or standard deviation of groups of 1000 time interval or period measurements, just a few jabs do it.
The 53230A can't even do that. Statistics keep piling up over all the measurements taken since it was last reset, which is useless for seeing trends or making adjustments. You have to talk to it from a PC, and write code, to do basic stuff.
I suspect that lots of people who write the code for instruments don't actually use those instruments. Lots of people who write the code for cars probably don't know how to drive.
Grrrr.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement
Don't know what you mean. They have been on sale at the "local" Microcenter. They *are* out of stock some 99% of the time though.
-- Rick
My point.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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