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Oscilloscopes For Modern Engineers?
Every few years someone asks this community for advice on oscilloscopes. Reader dawning writes "I've just graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering (and did a Comp Sci one while I was at it) and I'm finding myself woefully under-equipped to do some great hardware projects. I'm in major need of a good oscilloscope. I'm willing to put down $2,000 for a decent one, but there are several options and they all seem so archaic and limited. I'm happy to use something that must be controlled through a PC if that gives me more measuring features. What would you, my esteemed Slashdot colleagues, get for yourself?"
Well, just STFW.
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But the waveform itself is only one part of the picture(if you don't know whether a convincing logic 1 in the waveform is supposed to be a logic 0, that's why I mentioned BER capability. Those features are invaluable for computer and communications engineers.
Oh, shit. I just read the summary. 2-grand budget. Guess submitter could just grab a couple of Mexicans from Home Depot and give them a steel cable plugged into into a high-voltage residential transformer modulated by the original signal.
Please repeat after me:
missile..... miss - ile..... miss - eye - all
Nuclear....... nuc-le-ar..... Nuke - lee - are /s
We Europeans get rather concerned, when the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear missiles can neither say nor spell either of the words.
// TODO spellcheck above comment
// TODO let it lie
I'd worry more about embracing the Qur'an like the spineless fucks that you are. Indeed it will happen within the next 30 years due to your "enlightened liberalism" being used as a back door to usurp your own societies.
I knew that when the Dutch rolled over (as they have some of the biggest balls in Europe) that it was all over for you people.
Listen, you Labview fan boy, I am not smoking crack. (Although I will admit it: Labview makes me wish I was a toothless meth addict, hitting rock bottom, giving blowjobs to married, middle-aged closeted gay men in a movie theater for drug money.)
I spent more than 10 minutes learning that crap. More than a few weeks in fact. I got to know some Labview tech support "engineers" by name. The problem, I later realized, was that I knew exactly what I wanted the hardware to do, except I had to jump through all kinds of Labview hoops to get there. In C or C++, I could have had the majority of the hard parts done in a few days, and then polish up the details. Not so in Labview.
Ever try to force yourself to do something the hard way, when you know there is a much easier way to do it? Ever try to pee sitting down when you're a few pints in, and you really have to go? That's what working with Labview is like -- it will block your peehole until you are calmly sitting on the toilet like a good boy. If you are a girl it will make you pee standing up through one of those cardboard funnels.
Let's look at what you'd have to spend to get a hardware and software package that lets you look at signals at 10MHz.
Here is the "Buy Labview" (a.k.a. get raped in the ass with a cactus branch) web page:
http://www.ni.com/labview/buy/
I could go with Labview Base or Labview Full, but since I want to deploy stuff to customers' machines without forcing them to buy Labview, I'm going to go with Labview Professional for US$4299, although I should probably go for NI Developer Suite for US$4699 because it's the "best value."
Next, I want to sample at 10MHz or greater. In 5 minutes of searching, these are the only products that I could find, that will let me do that. Note that these both have a maximum rate of 10MHz; there don't seem to be NI products that can go higher.
If you go with the PCI version, you will need a PC with some pretty good horsepower to handle the 10MHz data stream. This may add an extra $1000 or $2000 to your total price.
If you go with the PXI version, then bend over and grab your ankles again, for into your bleeding rectum NI shall happily insert a well-lubricated PXI chassis of your choice, for an additional few thousands of $$$.
Add in all taxes and other costs (shipping, and oh yeah, $600 cables, anybody??) and it's pretty damn near $10k if not well above. Just for the privilege of writing multi-colored spaghetti code in order to make your measurements.
In conclusion, it is better to just get a real 60MHz digital scope for a few grand. Labview treats intelligent humans like dogs.