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Similarly can anyone recommend an affordable oscilloscope? Ideally mixed signal and PC attached.

Picoscopes are great and very affordable on a work budget, but a bit much for my home budget particularly if you want a mixed signal one.



I’ve been very happy with my Siglent 4 channel/100 MHz scope (with logic analyzer but I don’t have the $200 pod so I don’t use that). The scope was about $400 and I find it worth the investment. It’s on the same level as the popular Rigol lines but I don’t like their UIs very much (too chinesium for me?).


Get a used TDS-2xxx series used on ebay. I prefer Tek scopes, great trigger, and the TDS 210, TDS220 and their ilk continue to work very well. As to PC attach, yes, you can do that, but that will need some s/w.

Many people like the newer Chinese scopes; see https://youtu.be/S8jrpCoZyx8?si=oaI_gxOylYhOSp-m but I have only limited experience with those. Their UI seems less obvious than Tek scopes.

The other very important specs besides what you've mentioned are # of channels, and highest operating frequency. Others today would be how fast is the ADC, how many bits, storage depth, post-capture analysis capabilities, and so much more.


I have a lot of experience with Tek, HP and Siglent scopes. The Tek scopes are IMO some of the least intuitive.

But if you want to remote control the scope, stay away from the Chinese ones: that part of the FW is often very buggy.


What frequencies, how many channels of analog/digital, what bit depth, how much memory, etc? What is your actual application? And what do you mean "PC attached" here? What is your budget?

I don't think you are going to find much for less than a Picoscope.

Maybe something like the Analog Discovery 3? Under 400 USD, 2 channel oscilloscope (30 MHz), 16 channel digital, 2 channel arbitrary waveform generator (12 Mhz) https://digilent.com/shop/analog-discovery-3/

Rigol and Siglent both make mixed signal scopes that will do two channels analog at 100MHz and 16 channel digital for ~1k USD.


I wasn't familiar with the the Analog Discovery. Seems good value as it covers a lot of bases in one go.

30 Mhz is a bit low, but would cover the lower speed digital stuff which is what I need a scope for most of the time.

Two scope channels, some logic analyser channels, ideally 50 MHz, ideally 12 bit. That works at as about £500 from Picoscope which is pretty cheap. I was astonished at these Spectrum Analyzers and I was wondering if there was something from china at a fraction of that.


The TinySA is kind of like a tiny radio, just tuning through the channels and measuring how loud at each frequency. And it managed to leverage an exiting chip (designed for other purposes), which is how it got to be so cheap.

This is a great explanation of the signal path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63cXhYzS1A


Related: I recall seeing USB scopes very cheap like ... 5 years ago, maybe 6?

Are they any good? In the market for a very cheap 'scope - think, looking at i2c signals, 0v-5v analog signals from (for example) a temp sensor, etc.

Is the buspirate still around?


keysight(leaders in the industry) released a model(EDUX1052A) for hobbyists starting at $500.

https://www.keysight.com/us/en/support/EDUX1052A/oscilloscop...

They also have DSOX1202A & DSOX1202G for ~$1k -> ~$1.2k


Analog discovery series is cheap and good enough for a lot of tasks.


I've found Analog Discovery true to its name -- great for exploring analog. The scope portion is limited in channel sensitivity and frequency. It's also a bit of a kludge, in that the probes attach via a 2x20 (?) front-panel 0.1" center connector to an adaptor board that has BNC females for the scope probes.

I have one of those (AD2; there is a newer AD3 available), and it's quite a lot of 'stuff' in one package. I wish I had one when I was learning EE. But these days, I use them as 'data acquisition and control' modules to generate and capture signals under program (Python) control. I think of them sort of as a fancy Arduino -- although it can do many more analog tricks. Recommended.




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