14 Mar
2023
14 Mar
'23
2:32 a.m.
There are some nice mixed signal oscilloscopes made by Rigol (Chinese) at a
very affordable price. They have a very deep capture buffer for both analog
and digital signals. The build quality and capabilities of the MSO1104Z I
have are outstanding. I got all the options included for free as a special
offer (various decoding options, increased capture buffer depth, etc). IIRC
none of the Rigol mixed signal scopes have more than 16 digital channels,
but I never really needed more. There is an excellent review including
teardown on David Jones' eevblog. All logic analysers I have used had a
trigger output so that you can cascade multiple different ones to increase
the number of channels captured. The only problem I can see with less than
32 channels would be if you have to trigger on a specific combination
involving all 32 bits. Even that could be solved by a bit of external logic
if you are desperate enough.
Tom Hunter
On Tue, 14 Mar 2023, 9:12 am Paul Koning via cctalk, <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Gents,
I've been doing logic debugging (on a fairly primitive software defined
radio I designed back in 1999) with an old Philips logic analyzer. It's
not bad, certainly fast enough (I need 100 Msamples/s, it can do twice
that) and it's more than wide enough (I need 32 channels). But its capture
memory is microscopic so I struggle to see more than one or two
transactions, and I need to see more than that.
Some poking around shows various USB-connected logic analyzers for quite
low prices, and a number of them seem to have suitable specs. I also ran
across sigrok.org which seems to be an open source logic analysis
framework that can drive a bunch of those devices. Nice given that too
many of them only come with Windows software.
I suspect there are others that have not too expensive logic analyzers and
might be able to offer up suggestions or product reviews.
paul