I’m thinking of buying one of the usb oscilloscope analyzers
What’s the best cheapest more bang for your buck type out there…I want to be able to reverse engineer the various serial I2C etc. and logic stuff and our robot level oscilloscope stuff.
any suggestions would be great.
I have enough brains to use one with good documentation but not quite sure which would be the best option for robotics.
It is hard to say… I started off with one of these: parallax.com/Store/Component … roductName
Not the greatest, but still use it on a very rare occasion to check analog information or if things go real screwy, like figuring out why the sparkfun XBee board did not work with one of my processors…
But what I use most of the time is a logic analyzer: saleae.com/logic/
I have been very happy with it and it has saved me many many times! There may be better ones out there, but I like it.
Kurt
Kurte:
Are you familiar with this one, could I do the same stuff with it?
I can pick it up locally for $150.00 Can.
Sorry I know nothing about that one. My guess is that you can do a bunch of stuff with it. But again it is only two channels, which if you are doing analog type stuff would be great.
Where I find I do all of my debugging is with digital stuff. Like why isn’t the PS2 working. Here I hook up leads to the 4 pins and start recording. With my logic analyzer I would say in that case that I am doing SPI and choose which channels are doing what and it will automatically analyze it and show which characters are being sent.
Likewise recently when I was trying to figure out why the Bap28/Arc32 Serout was not working properly at 115200, I hooked it up, told it I was doing Async communications and told it which baud rate I was using. It then tried to analyze the input and show were the bits would normally be sampled and you could see that was off. I then told it to guess what the actual baud rate was and in this case it was 125000…
But as I mentioned above it did not detect why the sparkfun XBee adapter was not working with an Axon2 controller. It looked like no data was getting through. What actually happened was the adapter was taking care of voltage shifting down from 5V to 3V, but it did not shift the 3V coming from the XBee up to 5V to the Axon and the actual high voltage was not high enough to register as a high value… Likewise it did not detect the hardware issue Zenta had with an earlier version of the Arc32 with digital servos… These problems were better discovered by seeing the actual voltages…
So everything is a trade off…
Kurt
Hey great that gives me a bit more info, I would probably be better off with a device like you have because that’s what I need to do also on some of the stuff I’m working on ( decoding serial stuff ) thanks again.
Dave
I don’t know a lot about Oscilloscope… but that something i have see…
dealextreme.com/p/ds0201-2-8-lcd-pocket-mini-oscilloscope-v1-5-device-micro-sd-tf-card-slot-39750
Maybe someone can analyse the specs ?
I picked this one up ( The CGR-101 ) it does have 8 digital ins and 8 outs plus the 2 analog…
now to have some fun.
