Oscilloscope

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Last Updated: Sunday, 30 October 2022 21:00

Published: Monday, 03 October 2022 15:51

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Oscilloscope:

Oscilloscopes are the most used piece of hardware by electrical engineers. Whenever you are working on real chip, and need to debug it, oscilloscope is your first gadget. They allow you to observe signals on various pins of the chip. Oscilloscopes allow you to observe analog signals, but digital signals can be observed as well. Oscilloscopes are very expensive costing 1000's of dollars. The price of oscilloscope is highly dependent on the Bandwidth of the Oscilloscope. Most cheaper ones on ebay selling for < $50 are digital and can sample only 1 Million samples per second (BW is ~ 100 KHz). Ones selling for > $200 have sample rates of 1 gig samples per second (BW is ~100 MHz).

Best place to buy an oscilloscope is from a local education institute. They usually clean their electronics lab every few years, and give them away for almost free. Other good place is to buy a used one for ebay. One such oscilloscope selling for $200 here:

Tektronix TDS 210 Oscilloscope: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314109595520 => selling for $200 with BW=60MHz. Usually sufficient for home made electronics.

Siglent 100MHz Oscillocope:  https://slickdeals.net/f/16074640-siglent-technologies-sds1104x-e-100mhz-digital-oscilloscope-4-channels-standard-decoder-grey-399-10 => An even better one for $400 (see comments for a youtube link for all cool things you can do)

Building Oscilloscope:

Best way to learn about anything is to build it yourself. Here's a nice tutorial on how to build your own oscilloscope.

https://picaxe.com/docs/osc001_design.pdf

I've a local copy of it here: oscilloscope_diy_design.pdf

I haven't built it myself. Will try it someday.