Favorite Logic Analyzer for Hobby Use

I am looking for a good basic logic analyzer for hobby use.

I am currently considering the Tektronix 1240/1241 series.

What is the opinion of the group?

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

TMT

Reply to
Too_Many_Tools
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HP 1630G is a nice unit if you don't need to go over ~25MHz IIRC. Make sure you get the pods and all the leads (and clips, if you can). A set of new clips alone will cost more than the used unit.

Richard

Reply to
Richard H.

I've never used a logic analyzer. Seems to me that in a fraction of the time it takes to learn how to use one, and set up all the connections, and acquire and analyze all the data, you could have solved the problem in the comfort of your office, sipping coffee, thinking over the logic design like you should have in the first place.

Logic analysis, like software debugging, usually just points out stuff that should have been obvious from the beginning. Both contribute to the hack-and-fiddle style of design.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Yes, if you designed all the parts of the system. How about a device that is hooked to a generic PC through the parallel port? I have a line of products that connect that way, using the IEEE-1284 protocol (EPP mode). I have found all sorts of bizarre defects in motherboards, such as some where the CPU fails to go into a wait state until the handshaked 1284 transfer completes! No way I can fix that, you just have to tell the customer he needs a different motherboard. The symptom was that the data presented by the PC would change in the middle of the cycle, before the slave device had given the handshake signal. This only happened on every 2% of the cycles

But, how will you tell that a commercial, off the shelf product is hopelessly defective, and can't be fixed by any external software or hardware hack? I found this out in about 10 minutes with a logic analyzer, and was able to move on to another problem that I could solve.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Yup, that'a another one I NEVER would have found without a logic analyzer. It was a microprocessor-driven controller for an editing video recorder, that I made as a product. Came back from the customer after working fine for a year. With the LA, it was clear in about 5 minutes that the load immediate instruction of the CPU was no longer moving data to a register (any register, I think). I could see the CPU fetch the instruction, then fetch the immediate data, then fetch an output instruction, and then always send a zero with the output strobe, no matter what the actual immediate value was. OK, clearly the CPU, so I replaced it, tested the unit and returned it to the customer.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

If we are talking COTS procurement, then you should have at least generated some list of criteria for potential units to fulfil as a minimum. Such criteria would include performance measures and be quite specific about what was expected. If the unit (treated as a black box) did not match up to the minimum criteria, then you reject it surely.

Anyway, aside from that, I have a link, from Jack Ganssle, that may prove interesting for the participants in this thread, if you are really after logic analysers or clever scopes.

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Paul E. Bennett

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