Similarly can anyone recommend an affordable oscilloscope? Ideally mixed signal and PC attached.
Picoscopes are great and very affordable on a work budget, but a bit much for my home budget particularly if you want a mixed signal one.
Picoscopes are great and very affordable on a work budget, but a bit much for my home budget particularly if you want a mixed signal one.
Many people like the newer Chinese scopes; see https://youtu.be/S8jrpCoZyx8?si=oaI_gxOylYhOSp-m but I have only limited experience with those. Their UI seems less obvious than Tek scopes.
The other very important specs besides what you've mentioned are # of channels, and highest operating frequency. Others today would be how fast is the ADC, how many bits, storage depth, post-capture analysis capabilities, and so much more.
But if you want to remote control the scope, stay away from the Chinese ones: that part of the FW is often very buggy.
I don't think you are going to find much for less than a Picoscope.
Maybe something like the Analog Discovery 3? Under 400 USD, 2 channel oscilloscope (30 MHz), 16 channel digital, 2 channel arbitrary waveform generator (12 Mhz) https://digilent.com/shop/analog-discovery-3/
Rigol and Siglent both make mixed signal scopes that will do two channels analog at 100MHz and 16 channel digital for ~1k USD.
30 Mhz is a bit low, but would cover the lower speed digital stuff which is what I need a scope for most of the time.
Two scope channels, some logic analyser channels, ideally 50 MHz, ideally 12 bit. That works at as about £500 from Picoscope which is pretty cheap. I was astonished at these Spectrum Analyzers and I was wondering if there was something from china at a fraction of that.
This is a great explanation of the signal path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63cXhYzS1A
Are they any good? In the market for a very cheap 'scope - think, looking at i2c signals, 0v-5v analog signals from (for example) a temp sensor, etc.
Is the buspirate still around?
https://www.keysight.com/us/en/support/EDUX1052A/oscilloscop...
They also have DSOX1202A & DSOX1202G for ~$1k -> ~$1.2k
I have one of those (AD2; there is a newer AD3 available), and it's quite a lot of 'stuff' in one package. I wish I had one when I was learning EE. But these days, I use them as 'data acquisition and control' modules to generate and capture signals under program (Python) control. I think of them sort of as a fancy Arduino -- although it can do many more analog tricks. Recommended.