MAKE | Introduction to Oscilloscopes

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By Bre Pettis
Posted 2007/02/23 @ 10:16 pm
Category General

An Oscilloscope is an electronic measurement devices that is handy to have in the workshop for observing the characteristics of a circuit in real time, debugging, and hardware hacking. Joe Grand, of Grand Idea Studio, introduces us to the use of oscilloscopes this weekend and shows how it works.

Want to know more? Check out these tutorials!

Doctronics Oscilloscope Tutorial – Link
Williamson Labs Oscilloscope Tutorial – Link
Trinity Collegt Oscilloscope Tutorial – Link

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5 Responses to Introduction to Oscilloscopes – Make: Podcast

samurai1200 on February 23rd, 2007 at 6:20 pm said:

Just went over oscilloscopes in my Physics 226 lab, but they were old school ones from the 80s. USB makes this pretty interesting.

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r080 on February 25th, 2007 at 11:46 am said:

I had never seen a USB scope for so cheap.

Did he say 200 MHz BW lets you see really *slow* signals? Is that right?

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charliex on March 1st, 2007 at 6:04 pm said:

I think he said 20Mhz, but i thought the parallax usb scope is 1 million samples per second for 1 channel, so its good for audio and low speeed serial etc.

Doesn’t seem like a great deal when you consider frys sells 10/20Mhz standalone scopes for about the same price, and you get the benefit of a much faster update with the CRT.

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Strongsad.ca on March 6th, 2007 at 1:23 pm said:

I noticed he is running the scope on a MacBook Pro, but according to the Parallax web site the software is MS Windows only. Is it being run under some virtualization such as Parallels or did he duel boot it with Boot Camp or something similar?

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Dan on January 28th, 2008 at 3:07 pm said:

@Charliex:
That’s interesting, I never stopped to price the scopes at Fry’s…. I figured they were probably all in $400+ range.
One point: definitely the CRT is nice (hey I’m a 38 year old EE who learned on old CRT analog scopes), but the nice thing about these PC/Digital scopes is that they can acquire/store data so you can then export the data, run signal processing algorithms on it, etc…

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