USB Oscilloscopes

Anyone using one of these?

Leonard

Reply to
Leonard Caillouet
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Hi Leonard

I have a magazine article in pdf which does an in-depth review of a large number of these instruments. If you want to contact me off-group with a valid e-mail address, I'll send you it.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

I'd love to have this article as well. snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

happy t>

Reply to
runxctry

Hi

My trusty oscilloscope has finally died beyond repair. I have a spare laptop in my workshop and was thinking about buying a USB oscilloscope. Is anyone here using one of these things? How do you rate it? My needs are pretty low spec, dual channel 40MHz will be fine.

Thanks

Reply to
BodgeIt

If it's Tek or HP, it's probably worth fixing. There are subtle things that can be seen on an analog scope that a digitized equivalent sometimes miss.

If you're doing just audio, then a sound card based scope might be sufficient. I mostly use: (Donation suggested) ($10)

For fun, I was running an oscilloscope on my Windoze Mobile based cell phone (Verizon XV6700), but never bothered to register the product:

($25)

The problem with all of these is the limited frequency response (about

20KHz max) and no provisions for measuring DC as in a DVM.

I recently borrowed a CGR-101 USB oscilloscope: ($197 including shipping and tax)

but it doesn't quite meet your requirements (only 20MHz BW). The main attraction was the VNA features, Labview compatibility, Open Source (Windoze/Linux/OSx) software. The VNA is limited to 3MHz. I didn't get to play with it long enough to break much, but it did function under XP SP3 and OS/X on some fairly marginal hardware. I didn't have time to try Ubuntu.

A minor problem I ran into was that I have most of my documentation either online or in PDF format. Since I only have one monitor on the bench, I was constantly switching back and forth between the schematic and the scope display. I eventually gave up and just printed the PDF schematic, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. Methinks a USB scope deserves its own computah.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

For something as lo-tech as that you might consider to make one yourself. A neat little project built around a moderate speed a to d 'verter, maybe go up to 100, or 200, M Samples/sec and then save to a reg. When you acquire, say, 256 (or however many, maybe from 64 to 1024) Samples then send them to the pc as one "trace sweep".

Use the printer port, a com port, a usb, or even a firewire for the transfer (and control), all are pretty much single chip implements.

Write some visual basic or c code for acq and display. Neato. And you build up all these great skills too.

I would bet you could even find a complete schematic for this online.

DA p/s Later on, add a d to a and a 4-bytewide storage reg and you have the basis of a waveform synthesizer on board also. wowie zowie!

Reply to
DrArm

A few months back, Elektor magazine did an issue dedicated to to virtual test equipment, and they did detailed reviews of a large number of USB 'scopes, as I recall. Everything is archived on their website, and all the articles are available for download for a small fee. Might be worth you searching the issue on their website, and taking a look at the article if you can find it.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

Where can one buy a 20Mhz dual channel analog scope with all the features of the USB scope for under $200? I'm totally comfortable with an analog scope, but that's only because I started using scopes in the 1950's. A Tek 5000 series scope, with a zillion push buttons, knobs, blinken-lighten, and possible configurations, is not a problem for me. However, trying to show students, beginners, and engineering skool graduates, how to operate one, is quite a challenge. They grew up in the computer age, and are far more familiar with point and click, and with spinning the knobs and punching the buttons.

Yep. This is a repair newsgroup and that's where you get scopes that have to be repaired.

Yep.

What don't you like about them? Does your analog scope do screen prints? Data logging? Digital readout? Have a built in signal/sweep/noise generator? Does glitch capture, time rollback, complex math, storage, waveform comparisons, run on battery, etc? Can your box be moved or lifted without a scope cart or fork lift? Ad nauseam. Lots of features in a USB scope that are not found in commodity analog scopes.

Under $200 is what I consider affordable which is the price of several commodity USB scopes. However, as speed/bandwidth/resolution increases, the cost of the A/D box increases dramatically. Need 12GHz bandwidth? It's only $10,000.

Marginally related drive: When I inherited some money when my father died, the first thing I bought with the cash were scope probes. There's a moral here, but I'll pretend not to see it.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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