[TriEmbed] MSO may grow on you Re: Budget minded oscilloscope

John Wettroth jwet at mindspring.com
Mon Feb 22 10:46:06 CST 2021


 
My 2 cents here as an owner of way too much test equipment.

I agree with a lot of what has been said here.  I'm not sold on the MSO idea
however, I think vendors charge too much for the MSO option on what would be
a cheap scope.  I think a better solution is an inexpensive 4 channel scope
like the Rigol and a very inextpensive USB logic analyzer, either a chinese
clone of the Salae (or a real one).  These can be head on Ebay for $20- way
cheaper than an MSO upgrade on a scope.  Logic analysis on the PC is less
tedious to setup and I can look at lots of channel.  I don't like USB
oscilloscopes however- they're too slow and messy for quick probing.    A 4
channel scope like the Rigol 1054x with some internal protocol analysis does
almost everything I've ever needed.  If I need to look at something more
comples, I can hook up the little analyzer and use it along side.  If I
really need to look at Mixed signal stuff, I can trigger on a common signal.
Though looking at an analog signal and a bunch of digital signals on the
same screen, sounds useful, it doesn't come up that often.

Most of the little logic analyzers will run the Salae software which is
really excellent or an open source software called Sump which is a whole
'nother discussion.

Regards,
John M. Wettroth
(984) 329-5420 (home)
(919) 349-9875 (cell) 
-----Original Message-----
From: TriEmbed [mailto:triembed-bounces at triembed.org] On Behalf Of Pete
Soper via TriEmbed
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2021 9:15 PM
To: triembed at triembed.org
Subject: [TriEmbed] MSO may grow on you Re: Budget minded oscilloscope

If you think you might be starting to play a long game consider getting 
a "mixed signal" 'scope that can capture, trigger on, and decode a set 
of digital signals as well as providing analog measurements, and 
consider I2C/SPI/UART/USART decoding essential, if only as an option 
(i.e. don't drop the money for something that can't eventually decode 
these dead common serial modes unless you know you're only dipping a toe 
in). I went a long time with my Rigol without an "unavoidable use case" 
for logic signals involved with debugging new hardware, but when those 
use cases finally came around it was nice to have the capability and not 
be looking around for another piece of equipment, most especially when 
you need to see what's going on with several signals at once. In about 
seven years I think I've topped out with two analog and seven or eight 
digital signals with one set of gadgets. The integration of digital and 
analog is a real plus, for instance where you need to jump around 
between figuring out a noise issue vs something basically wrong with a 
serial line like with I2C. And of course you can correlate analog such 
as with A/D converters with digital signals feeding them to sort out issues.

-Pete



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