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USB oscilloscope for troublshooting?

From time to time it'd be really handy to have an oscilloscope. Something like a Tektronix TDS2010 would be very nice. Too nice, and expensive, for as often as I'd use it. And, much too good for the sorts of things I'm likely to measure. An example would be watching for power supply sags during computer boot-up, or maybe disk spin-up. Basically audio bandwidth, but with the ability to capture transients by stop trigger.

What about "oscilloscopes" based on USB sound cards? The one that's handy is xoscope, available via apt on RasPiOS. It's installed, but the man page gives no hint what sort of sound device, or general purpose A/D converters, are supported.

I don't have a hard-and-fast performance requirement, nor one for price. It'd need to work from below 60Hz upwards, and cost around $10/kHz or less at higher bandwidths with a cap in the $200-500 range. DC response would be nice but not essential, calibrated amplitudes aren't really necessary but would be convenient. Possibly the biggest constraint is that I do not own a Windows license and have no modern Windows-compatible hardware, so the choices are MacOS 10.7.5, RasPiOS or FreeBSD only.

If anybody has experiences or suggestions for devices and software to consider please post.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska
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If you are going to spend 200 to 500 look at the Hantek scopes for around $ 350.

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Reply to
Ralph Mowery

I have a Rigol DS1100 and have been very happy with it. The auto signal find option makes it MUCH easier to use than the old scopes.

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- Kerry

Reply to
Kerry Imming

From what I understand, most people who have tried both, prefer a standalone scope over a PC based one.

You can get a very nice, brand new, hobby scope for that kind of money. The Rigol DS1054Z seems to be available for around $450. That is a four-channel, 50 MHz scope. It can easily be hacked for 100 MHz bandwidth.

Reply to
HW

visual analyser works on FreeBSD with WINE, but you're limited to soundcard/chip bandwidth and line level input voltages.

Reply to
mjmcl

Understood completely, if this were for routine use I'd agree. But, mine is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case.

That's better than I need by a wide margin, but it's tempting 8-)

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska

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