oscilloscope

273 Articles

Tearing Into A $1.3 Million Oscilloscope

September 24, 2018 by 61 Comments

Most hackers are rankled by those “Warranty Void If Broken” seals on the sides of new test equipment. Even if they’re illegal, they at least put the thought in your head that the space inside your new gear is off-limits, and that prevents you from taking a look at what’s inside. Simply unacceptable.

[Shahriar] has no fear of such labels and tears into just about everything that comes across his bench. Including, most recently, a $1.3 million 110-GHz oscilloscope from Keysight. It’s a teardown that few of us will ever get the chance to do, and fewer still would be brave enough to attempt. Thankfully he does, and the teardown video below shows off the remarkable engineering that went into this monster.

The numbers boggle the mind. Apart from the raw bandwidth, this is a four-channel scope (althought the unit [Shahriar] tested is a two-channel) that doesn’t split its bandwidth across channels. The sampling rate is 256 GS/s and the architecture is 10-bits, so this thing is dealing with 10 terabits per second. We found the extra thick PCBs, which are perhaps 32-layer boards, to be especially interesting, and [Shariar]’s tour of the front end was fascinating.

It all sounds like black magic at first, but he really makes the technology approachable, and his appreciation for fine engineering is obvious. If you’ve got even a passing interest in RF electronics you should check it out. You might want to brush up on microwave topics first, though; this Doppler radar teardown might help.

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The Pre-CRT Oscilloscope

September 11, 2018 by 31 Comments

Oscilloscopes are especially magical because they translate the abstract world of electronics into something you can visualize. These days, a scope is likely to use an LCD or another kind of flat electronic display, but the gold standard for many years was the ubiquitous CRT (cathode ray tube). Historically, though, CRTs were not very common in the early days of electronics and radio. What we think of as a CRT didn’t really show up until 1931, although if you could draw a high vacuum and provide 30 kV, there were tubes as early as 1919. But there was a lot of electronics work done well before that, so how did early scientists visualize electric current? You might think the answer is “they didn’t,” but that’s not true. We are spoiled today with high-resolution electronic displays, but our grandfathers were clever and used what they had to visualize electronics.

Keep in mind, you couldn’t even get an electronic amplifier until the early 1900s (something we’ve talked about before). The earliest way to get a visual idea of what was happening in a circuit was purely a manual process. You would make measurements and draw your readings on a piece of graph paper.

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You’ve Never See A Solid-State Oscilloscope Like This One

August 25, 2018 by 44 Comments

Remember a the time before oscilloscopes had a brain? It’s easy to forget as we’ve become accustomed to a class of simple solid state oscilloscope using a microcontroller as signal processor and a small LCD display to show the resulting waveforms. They are commonly available as inexpensive kits, and while their bandwidth is not huge they give a good account of themselves in low frequency applications. But of course, originally the signal processing was handled in a much simpler way.

[SimpleTronic] reminds us that a small solid state oscilloscope does not need a microcontroller, with a ‘scope on a breadboard that displays waveforms on an LED matrix in a much more traditional manner. This is very much an analogue oscilloscope, in which the X deflection circuitry of the CRT is replaced by a decade counter stepping through the columns of LEDs on the display, and the Y deflection circuitry by some analogue signal conditioning followed by an LM3914 bar graph display chip driving the display rows. There are a few refinements such as a trigger circuit, but it remains a very understandable and surprisingly simple device.

It has a claimed bandwidth of 40 kHz defined by its sweep ranges rather than its analogue bandwidth, and an input voltage range from 50 mVpp to 50 Vpp. It’s hardly a useful instrument due to its low bandwidth, but its strength lies in novelty and in understanding a traditional oscilloscope rather than in its utility. You can see it in action in the video we’ve placed below the break.

‘Scopes of limited use appear from time to time on these pages. A favourite of ours is this soldering iron.

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Gameduino + Mystorm = Oscilloscope!

August 4, 2018 by 4 Comments

There has to be more than one of us who over the years since the launch of systems like the original Game Boy have eyed up these handheld platforms and thought “You could make a really neat little oscilloscope with that!” But the commercial systems are closed-source, locked down, and proprietary, so in many cases there’s little easy prospect of such a device being created.

Fortunately though, there are now very accessible handheld gaming platforms, and [James Bowman], the creator of the Gameduino series of boards, writes in to tell us about an oscilloscope project for the Gameduino 3 created by [Lawrie Griffiths]. It uses a Mystorm FPGA board with an AN108 analogue board, and while the heavy lifting of acquisition is handled by the FPGA it is left to the Mystorm’s STM32 to talk to the Gameduino. There are a few teething troubles such as the Gameduino complaining when it is fed data too quickly, but the result is an effective 8 MHz bandwidth instrument with a touchscreen interface. He does however admit that the interface is a little fiddly at the moment. All the code is available via GitHub, so should you wish to pursue this particular avenue yourself, you can.

The Mystorm has made more than one appearance here over the years, and we’re sure we’ll see more. We saw it emulating a small OLED display to put Arduboy graphics on the big screen, for example, and implementing a complete Acorn BBC Micro home computer.

Learn Six Oscilloscope Measurements With One Arduino

June 17, 2018 by 8 Comments

We won’t mention names, but we are always dismayed to see people twist knobs randomly on a scope until it shows a good picture. These days, there’s the dreaded auto button, too, which is nearly as bad. If you haven’t spent the time to learn how to properly use a scope [Bald Engineer] has a great introduction to making six measurements with an Arduino as a test device.

To follow along you’ll need an Arduino UNO and a two-channel (or better) scope. Actually, most of the measurements would probably work on any Arduino, but there are some that require the separate USB to serial chip like that found on the UNO and similar boards.

The six measurements are:

  1. The auto reset programming pulse
  2. Capture and decode serial data
  3. Noise on the power rail
  4. Observe probe loading effects
  5. PWM duty cycle
  6. The timing of pin manipulation code

Some of these measurements use a bit of Arduino code, while others just make use of the circuitry on the board no matter what software is running.

Not only does the post show you where to make the measurements and what the result should look like, there’s also a discussion of what the measurement means and some suggested things to try on your own.

If you go through this post, you might also enjoy learning more about probes. If you are feeling adventurous, you can even build your own current probe.

Blinging Up A Scope: Scale Your Divisions In Style

June 14, 2018 by 20 Comments

When a hacker owns an oscilloscope, it’s more than a possession. Weary nights are spent staring at the display, frantically twiddling the dials to coax out vital information. Over time, a bond is formed – and only the best will do for your scope. So why settle for the stock plastic dials when you could go for gold? Well in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re partial to a bit of over-engineering here at Hackaday, and [AvE] has upgraded his Rigol scope by adding metal knobs.

Employing his usual talent in the shop, [AvE] first turns the basic knob shapes from the stock, before drilling them and milling the outer texture pattern at an angle. Voilà: six custom knobs for 100% more torque and traction control. No matter how trivial the project, it’s always good to watch him at work. This [AvE] video doesn’t come with the usual fruity language warning; instead this build is set to the swelling tones of Beethoven. “Less Talk – More Action!” says the title, but we have to say that we miss his quips. That said, he still manages to deliver his signature humour through action alone.

For some slightly more functional oscilloscope upgrades, you can read about adding a hybrid touchscreen interface, or hacking a Rigol scope’s software to unlock greater bandwidth, storage depth and more.

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An Oscilloscope For The Nuclear Age

May 26, 2018 by 30 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we’re suckers for vintage instruments. More than one of our staffers has a bench adorned with devices spanning many decades, and there’s nothing more we like reading about that excursions into the more interesting or unusual examples. So when a Tweet comes our way talking about a very special oscilloscope, of course we have to take a look! The Tektronix 519 from 1962 has a 1GHz bandwidth, and [Timothy Koeth] has two of them in his collection. His description may be a year or two old, but this is the kind of device for which the up-to-the-minute doesn’t matter.

A modern 1GHz oscilloscope is hardly cheap, but is substantially a higher-speed version of the run-of-the-mill ‘scope you probably have on your bench. Its 1962 equivalent comes from a time when GHz broadband amplifiers for an oscilloscope input were the stuff of science fiction. The 519 takes the novel approach of eschewing amplification or signal conditioning and taking the input directly to the CRT deflection plates. It thus has a highly unusual 125Ω input impedance, and its feed passes through a coiled coaxial delay line to give the trigger circuits time to do their job before going into the CRT and then emerging from it for termination. It thus has a fixed deflection in volts per centimeter rather than millivolts, and each instrument has the calibration of its CRT embossed upon its bezel.

The 519 would not have been a cheap instrument in 1962, and it is no accident that there are reports of many of them coming back to Tek for service with radioactive contamination from their use in Government projects. We can’t help wondering whether the Russian equivalent super-high-speed ‘scope used the same approach, though we suspect we’ll never know.

If vintage Tek is your thing, have a look at their PCB manufacture from the 1960s.

Thanks [Luke Weston] for the tip.