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Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P https://espotek.com/labrador/

Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers but the mechanics who use a scope are by and large the technically sophisticated ones. Just a thought, it looks like a great product, I'm buying one just to hack into a portable scope so I don't have to deal with getting out my rigol for basic auto work.

Edit: it certainly doesn't need to be battery powered either, conveniently cars have 12v battery power avaliable (although it is quite dirty, so input protection is required). I'm on my phone RN, otherwise I'd pull up the schematics, it might already have adequate input protection.

Honestly, I designed it when I was a student because there was nothing usable at the low-end of the market.

While I could possibly charge a little bit more for it, I don't think the specs justify a $50+ price point (as-is), and for a lot of people that extra $20 makes a big difference.

There were some thoughts a while back of making a higher-end product to fill the $50-$80 gap, and possibly even a stripped down Labrador to sell around the $20 mark. Looking at the Amazon charts, a lot of people are buying knockoff DSO138s to save literally $5-$10 and are left with a really poor quality product.

Have you considered a bundle that includes a case? I don't do a lot of maker/tinkering stuff so having the chip loose or on a breadboard wouldn't work for me in most situations. But I do sometimes have a need for an oscilloscope or multimeter, and would gladly pay ~$50 for one that had a case and some basic/standard connections, especially if it's supported by open software like yours.

Edit: I still bought one as is, lol.

There are a couple of 3d printed cases on Thingiverse - one that keeps the original pinout and one that adds BNC connectors via a perfboard mod.

Thanks. I haven't gotten into 3D printing myself, but I'll check that out and maybe have a friend print one for me.

This looks great! I'm going to buy one because of the price point (I wouldn't at $50, but maybe plenty of others would).

Is this useful for a hobbyist? Everyone I've talked to said "get a proper oscilloscope, anything less is a toy" but I have neither the space nor the need for an oscilloscope. I have a Saleae Logic analyzer, but yours looks more featureful.

You could just add another kit to let the user turn it into an automotive scope.

This is a little off-topic, but since we're already on this: I just wanted to say "great job" on the Labrador. I don't even need one (I have benchtop scope, power supply, signal generator, logic analyzer, etc. already, and a couple of Bus Pirates) but couldn't resist ordering one just to acknowledge the awesomeness of your work.

Thanks so much. I've had a bit of a lousy week, so seeing random strangers say positive things on the internet has been a Godsend.

I've had a bit of a lousy week

Sorry to hear that. I hope the rest of your week, and the week to come, are absolutely awesome to make up for it!

Bought! Too cheap though...double, or even triple the price.

Seriously, 49.99 would still be a cheap price on that.

Haha, thanks.

no kidding... wtf

Sold! And, yes, you should charge more. Twice the price, and it still would have been an impulse buy for me.

Hi, does your scope have a ground that is isolated from USB ground? This would be a very useful feature.

It doesn't have an isolated ground (the focus was on size and cost), but this shouldn't be an issue. All spec-compliant USB ports contain self-resetting overcurrent protection - in practice this is almost always via a PTC resettable fuse on USB GND. For what it's worth, I haven't had a single complaint related to the grounding in 3 years.

Ok, but how would you (for example) measure the voltage difference over a current-sensing resistor that is positioned at the high-side of (say) a 48V rails?

(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)

Bought two(2) because a friend wanted one too!

10% discount if you buy in bulk? I'm getting my friends some too. :-)

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