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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

I was a huge Saleae fan but with the last few projects I've been converted into a Digilent Analog Discovery 2 fan.

You get analog oscilloscope features, good enough for almost everything you will need on a typical project aside from RF or DRAM. Really good logic analyzer capabilities including protocol decoding and injection of signals - with analog waveform generation, digital protocols, and a small 5V voltage supply. Saleae still can't send a byte over UART.

And it's scriptable! Python, C++, and LabView. Again, something Logic can't do.

I'm not saying someone just getting started needs one, but if you've been in the business for a while and/or are working remote and need something on your bench, this can do almost everything in one go. The Pro model looks even more serious but I've never needed anything that powerful.

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Hmm, but just a side note, one should not expect too much from it as a traditional analog scope. It's slow and its Achilles heel is the lack of an on board memory. It can neither cache more than 16k points, nor upload the samples through USB in real-time like a USB DAQ card. Today's sub-$1k Chinese scopes have few tens or hundreds of Mpts of sample memory, which turned out to be very helpful for my hobby.

Also it's quite overpriced now, unless one catch the $159 sale.

Slow? Perhaps. I don't know.

I was debugging a driver for those silly WS2812 RGB LEDs, the ones that are pretty picky about timing, and the AD2 could measure out edges in the 100 nSec range. Seemed pretty usable to me.

Recently being in the market for an oscilloscope, I was strongly considering the Digilent Analog Discovery 2, but I ended up going with the Siglent SDS1104X-E.

https://siglentna.com/digital-oscilloscopes/sds1000x-e-serie...

Just got it a day or so ago but am so far really impressed with it. It should be good until I hit some point where I need to upgrade. At that point, I should have a better idea of the exact features I need, although it was tempting to pre-upgrade to the SDS2000 series. The Rigol's seem great, especially the MSO5000 series with dedicated controls per channel, but I've seen a lot of complaints about noise levels and preferred the more featured and cheaper Siglent.

I'll probably get an Analog Discovery 2 or a Digital Discovery if I need some more digital logic stuff, although the Siglent can do some decoding.

I really dislike my Siglent. The measurement UI is horrible and the probes are iffy. I’m still mostly using a relatively ancient Agilent 546xx (can’t remember which model) and some decent Keysight probes and will probably sell the Siglent.

The Rigol UI is painfully slow. I didn’t buy one because of that.

I actually have the opposite feeling.

I have used quite a few low-end scopes at work, a new Siglent, Agilent DSO7034A, Tek DPO3054, some Tek TBS2000, some RS RTB2 and Keysight 3034T. I prefer the RS if my boss is paying for it, but there isn't too much to complain about the Siglent.

The DSO7000 series (and those other VxWorks infiniums) are the direct successor of 546xx, it always work and it's nice to have a few Mpts of memory. But the feature set is quite limited, no intensity grading display and the FFT looks so poor compared with more modern scopes. I'd be happy to replace that DSO7034A on our bench with a Siglent.

The KS3000T also have a laughably slow UI. The touch screen is supposed to make cursor measurements easier, but it doesn't. If one VNC to it (yes, running Windows CE), one can get miserably 1 fps.

That's a fair evaluation. I mostly do RF stuff these days (SA + VNA) so the scope use cases are fairly basic. Mine's a 54642D so 500MHz + LA. I don't want to put down at least 50x what I paid for it ($100 broken - $10 fix) for a new scope. The Siglent fills the feature gap and but I don't like it.

Yeah, those have been in my bucket list for a while, as they tick every box. Thanks for making me want one again!

I still think that Saleae clones are unbeatable for the price though and are the best investment someone getting started could want.

Yep - picked up one from eBay for $20 AUD. Fully compatible with their software. Amazing.

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