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Comment by throwayEngineer | Hacker News Reader

This is something I need. What alternatives exist? 30 dollars isn't bad, but communities of support are also nice.

The Red Pitaya STEMlab is a considerably more expensive device, but it's more than just a toy. It has two 14-bit, 125MS/s ADCs and DACs, 16 digital GPIOs and gigabit ethernet.

https://www.redpitaya.com/

That's nice, but I imagine the use cases are pretty different, the Pitaya's sampling frequency has 3 orders of magnitude on the Labrador (and 2 more bits of sensitivity). I think they're both pretty impressive for their respective prices.

The problem with RedPitaya is extremely poor software support. And without that you have only an expensive brick.

Worse, the board itself isn't open source, AFAIK, so even stuff like finding a schematic to get things done could be a challenge.

Why is the LCR meter expansion so damn expensive? The base starter kit is pretty reasonably priced, but I can't figure out what is going on with that LCR meter thing.. based on pictures the HW doesn't look like it has anything special on-board, so is it just a SW license cost thing?

I don't know about how much community support they have, but seeed sells some alternatives:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/oscilloscopes-c-880/DSCope-p-242... https://www.seeedstudio.com/oscilloscopes-c-880/Xminilab-Por...

I got several working, albeit, old, oscopes and signal generators from pawn shops for $50 to $100 each. Had to search a while, but they tend not to sell well there, so they eventually get marked down.

Someone recently mentioned something called “LHT00SU1”. It’s primarily a logic analyzer, but it has one analog input. (I’m not into EE, never used scopes, just randomly found a discussion about it recently)

In that vein the Saleae Logic[1] are really awesome, the prices went up recently but they're the real deal, next step up from them gets into the $X,000/$XX,000 range very quickly.

[1] https://www.saleae.com/

I have one of the Saleae devices, and it is wonderful. I still like (and sometimes really need) my more traditional full-size equipment, but the Saleae was inexpensive and it's easy to whip out and hook up to something.

I don't know if they still have a hobbyist discount, but when I bought mine they knocked a good chunk off the price after I emailed them and told them my plans for it as a tinkerer.

Wow they've really jacked the price up!

No disrespect to Saleae's Logic as even their 1st gen product was indeed outstanding value (and may still be at the current price point; software front end is well executed). But to be sure, there's still a significant hardware gap that sets it apart from "the real deal".

Try http://expeyes.in/ for a better alternative. Take a look at my other post in this thread for some more costlier options.

Well, the next step above would maybe be a low-end PicoScope (they start at 115$ for 10MHz).

https://www.picotech.com/products/oscilloscope

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