Red Pitaya: Open hardware instrumentation for everyone

kickstarter.com

50 points·talkingquickly··10 comments

I'm sure this is good for many things, but it won't make a great digital oscilloscope. A sample rate of 125Msps is not really high enough for a bandwidth of 50MHz in that context. The low-end Rigol oscilloscopes do 1Gsps.

How do they manage that? 1Gsps ADCs are really pricy.

They time interleave four Analog Devices AD9288 [0] dual 100MS/s 8 bit ADCs that are over clocked to sample at 125MS/s (so 125MS/s times 8 = 1GS/s).

What's fascinating is a number of people in the HW community have managed to reverse engineer the Rigol DS1052 scope. A Hellene on the EEVBlog forums has lovely pencil drawn schematics [1].

[0] http://www.analog.com/en/analog-to-digital-converters/ad-con...

[1] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/rigol-ds1052e-nasty-surpri...

The eevblog article was quite an interesting read. Thanks for sharing!

Just the sort of answer I was hoping for - thanks!

I suspect it might be more useful in, for example, software-designed radio applications which should be able to make use of the full analog bandwidth and the much better dynamic range.

Ah, I posted this almost a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282350

http://www.linkinstruments.com/mso19.htm

This has existed for a while and it's more accurate and most likely better tested. It's better suited to replace a lab oscilloscope, and a bit cheaper, but doesn't have the function generator or the other extra features mentioned for the Red Pitaya like the web interface

Another relatively similar instrument is the PicoScope series http://www.picotech.com/oscilloscope.html

The Zynq chip is a big plus -- easy reuse of the hardware platform -- but the analog... Duh. Deal-breaker.

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