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Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

> very good oscilloscopes with 200 MHz bandwidth, good user interfaces, and responsive displays are selling for $300

This is a very strong first world POV. Those U$D 300 rank pretty high across world's minimum salaries [1], not to mention that prices can very likely double in countries like my own.

Moreover, a large % of people that can really get a very good use of this (Kids in high school) usually have a lot less money at their disposal, and we are not getting into collaterals like building your own and learning how it works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...

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I totally agree.

Want to keep a distractable 14 year old busy for an hour? Give him or her some wire, a cheap meter, a battery, some switches and LEDs. Want to possibly change that kid’s life? Give him the above, plus a scope, and hook it up to a music player playing his favorite song.

That's a very fair point, but it's also fair to discuss things with a 'first world' point of view. The same way it can be humourous or eye-opening to point out something's a 'first world problem', but if that's where you live then that is a problem, that is something you're looking to address.

We're all looking to do the best we can from different baselines.

I get what you’re saying, but there are also fully functioning oscilloscopes for far less.

For the purposes you are talking about you can get what you need with one of the $20-40 scopes.

Those ones also tend to be portable and more rugged which is what you need if you don’t have a full blown lab to keep a nice oscilloscope in.

Note: the intention of this comment is just to be informative.

I did a quick search in my country's Mercado Libre (the local Amazon, we could say) and the cheapest available one, Fnirsi-138 Pro [1] goes for a price of aprox. 50 USD [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Oscilloscope-Portable-Samplin...

https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/osciloscopio-digital-fnirsi-...

Isn’t that an effect of taxes and logistics/shipping to Argentina?

It seems like the price of anything would scale similarly. If you imported this $18 device to At, it would probably double in price.

what makes the Flea-Scope so particularly interesting to me is that you get I think 9 channels worth of digital inputs all at once. That is hard to beat for the price.

Regarding raw specs, it seems to be much better in most regards compared to the mentioned Fnirsi-138 Pro.

The future has been here for a while but remains unevenly distributed.

Probably my favourite Gibson phrase.

So starting with nothing at all, what is the total cost of ownership for the flea -cope? My guess, its over $300, (if $300 is your annual salary, your existing phone will probably not cut it). And for comparison, standalone toy oscilloscopes (<10Mhz bandwidth) go for $30 and under (some $11), with screen, on AliExpress. And a "decent" one, like OWON, is around $150.

The problem is, with a toy scope, you aren't really gonna know if what you're measuring is real. This might be useful as a kit to build to learn how to program microcontrollers, or measure audio signals (the $11 one, or the mic on your phone can do this), but a bad scope will generally cause more problems for the hobbyist. When you get near the limit of a scope's bandwidth, the signals get really messy and full of artifacts. Arduinos run at 8-16Mhz, so you're gonna hit a wall really quickly and once you can't rely on the output, the investment will be lost.

Where's that guess coming from? The scope is $18, the optional probe from elecrow is $5 extra. You most definitely have either an android phone or a laptop/PC with a browser from the last ten years already. As such the cost is pretty minimal. Say you bought a set of these kind of test probes with hooks at the front. A set would maybe cost you $10. Now you can use all your 9 channels. I don't understand your price calculations.

Every scope out there has an upper limit in terms of speed. If you have no use for it, don't buy it. This oscilloscope is first and foremost a learning resource.

"This is a very strong first world POV. Those U$D 300 rank pretty high across world's minimum salaries "

My point, since I was replying to a poster who said the above, was if you are making $300 a year, you don't have a laptop. So, if you read my assumption, that you don't have a laptop, android phone or laptop, and you are making < $1000 USD a year, the Flea-Scope will cost more than a decent one with a built in display and much more than a ~2mhz toy intro oscilloscope ($11 on Aliexpress) [1]

I could also very well reply with just the quote above.

https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-oscilloscope-.html?spm...

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