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Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think if we each wrote a nice personal letter to Keysight they’d probably gift him one in exchange for the YouTube publicity. Several other electrical engineers on YT get free $20-50k keysight scopes not just for themselves, but once a year or so to give away to their audience members.

And yes, this person could make use of it. His videos are among the highest quality science explainers - he’s like the 3B1B of first principles in physics. Truly a savant at creating experiments that demonstrate fundamental phenomena. Seriously check out any of his videos. He made one that weighs an airplane overhead. His videos on speed of electricity and speed of motion and ohms law are fantastic.

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Keysight is not very hobbyist friendly these days. A year or two ago it broke on the Eevblog forums that they were refusing to honor warranties/service contracts unless you had a corporate account with them. If you were just a guy with a scope you would be SOL.

Do you have any better recommendations?

They’re not one of the big 3, but Rigol are pretty much the only scope co actively marketing models to hobbyists / individuals: https://www.rigol.com/europe/news/company-news/mho900-releas...

Also Siglent.

There was a Rohde and Schwarz rep that was pretty active on those forums when I still paid attention to it, might count for something.

Hard to justify going with the legacy brands as hobbyist with what comes out of China these days. Rigol and Sient make very capable hardware although h the UI can be a bit painful if you’re used to something else. Micsig produces very capable probes for a small fraction of the cost of the legacy players even high end specialty stuff like optically isolated probes. Those are still thousands but try pricing the equivalent from tek or Agilent, it would buy you a sedan.

What this experiment does is very similar to how an ordinary LIDAR unit operates, except that during a LIDAR scan the laser and the receiver are always pointed in the same direction, while in this demonstration the detector is scanning the room while the laser is stationary and is firing across the room.

But in principle, a LIDAR could be reconfigured for the purposes of such demonstration.

If one wants to build the circuit from scratch, then specifically for such applications there exist very inexpensive time-to-digital converter chips. For example, Texas Instruments TDC7200 costs just a few dollars and has time uncertainty of some tens of picoseconds.

And "Flash LIDAR" captures every pixel all at once. (But the frame rate is limited by how quickly the buffer can be read out and the sensor readied for the next frame.)

Quite right. There are many different kinds of depth sensors in addition to the canonical old school rotating mirror LIDAR.

I think some of the short range depth cameras (Kinect v2 was one) use time-of-flight technique, and could in principle be reconfigured to perform a similar demonstration, though it would not be as "homemade" and cool as the system built for the Youtube video.

Keysight quality has suffered after the spinoff. Oh I'd go with Tek. Maybe Rohde & Schwarz but I haven't used them in 20 years they were competitive for quite some time.

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