Seeed Studios has launched a contest centered around the DSO Quad. In case you’re unfamiliar with the hardware, the DSO Quad is a low-cost standalone oscilloscope. It’s got four channels, two of which are analog, and includes an ARM Cortex-M3 processor as well as an FPGA. Why are we recapping the hardware with the contest announcement? Because the contest rules state that you are allowed to alter the hardware despite the fact that this is more of a software-focused event.
But what you really should know about are the cash prizes going to the winners. Rank in the top four and you’ll claim $3000, $1500, $800, and $300 in cold hard cash. But even if you don’t take one of the top spots everyone still wins. That’s because all entries are open source and will be found in Seeed’s DSO Quad forums.
If judging people is more your thing Seeed needs some help with that too. They’re looking for qualified judges and application details are includes at the bottom of the contest page.
[Thanks Petteri]
This is GREAT news! The DSO quad is a great platform. I was beginning to worry it would be shelved due to disinterest.
I dont think I could pony up the money to get one to enter my ideas :(
that’s quite a nice marketing move there…
and that must be the less readable schematics I have ever read…
Why pay $200 for this when for $300 you can get a rigol oscilloscope what is more than 10 times better?
I’m not saying it’s a bad scope, but it’s price makes me look at something better.
To be fair, Digilent’s Analog Discovery is priced the same, but specs are better, although it doesn’t have a screen; i don’t mind using a laptop.
the cheaper Rigol ds1052 goes for $399 on ebay. and way over $400 on more reputable stores.
but still, a valid point!
btw, a inexpensive screen hack for the analog explorer would be cool… even though i only see it being better by the number of channels. consider it as ‘capable’ as the DSO on every other aspect.
But you can’t program those (the Rigol homebrew stuff is still quite useless). The DSO Quad is great for the open source nature.
This makes me quite happy they’re trying to improve the software. The hardware is nice and capable but the software is terribly tedious to setup and sometimes understand where the cursor will move to next depending what buttons you press.
I own one and a 100Mhz Tek scope and the Tek is far easier to navigate around.
The DSO Quad looks nice, but I simply don’t need that level of portability.
An open source version of something like the OWON SDS series, now that would be nice.
For anyone who’s interested in the chart porn on mini-scopes, I put this together last week:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiJoHeWBzmnAdE8xNWN1eWx6YjBmWE1kWDR0eXQ5WEE
Unfortunately, the DSO quad’s analog bandwidth is nowhere near 14Mhz.
“mine stock had 3dB anywhere from 400kHz to 1Mhz depending on the vertical scale selection. After patching up the front end the 3dB is now shy of 11Mhz for vertical scale settings.”
This is with hardcore hardware hacking.
What was limiting the bandwidth?
dso quad isn’t 14400khz bandwith, its more like 1-5mhz. I am currently working/tuning to get the analog and digital channels more than 10mhz on the V2.7 hardware. Some gain levels can even hit 15-20mhz after doing some hardware changes. It is funny Seeed Studios doing this while they didn’t release the latest fpga, sys and app sources. The latest sources community has is way old. Also the signal generator output makes noise on analog channel A. And the tvs diode on analog channels has too high capacitance and is for 5v protection, while the absolute max rating is 3.6v on that bank on the fpga, so putting a higher voltage in it than that might destroy digital.
Anyway, I am tuning the hardware, and will post hardware changes on seeedstudio forums when I am done :)
correction: the tvs is on the digital channels, I replaced the original with RClamp3304P
I have one of these with v2.7 hardware. Great, especially with the added PAWN.
The file system corrupts. Is this becuase of the new RAM chip?
The SYSB152 firmware source is not available, so I cannot say if this is disabled during file reads
I know this comment is old, but for people who are looking for solution about file system corruption here is the link: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~jpa/dsoquad/ . There you can find AlterBIOS for DSO Quad, it solved file system corruption problem for me.