I’ve always wanted an oscilloscope, but always kept putting off buying one because (1) I couldn’t justify the cost and (2) if I had money for a scope, it wasn’t enough for the top of the line one I wanted. I finally decided to “get something” and stop worrying about it. Not that I do much electronics now, but sometimes it is nice to be able to peak at the signals inside a circuit. This on is good enough for most electronics work that doesn’t involve any sort of rf.

The software was a bit hard to find on the site. The software can be found here. The oscilloscope software comes in two version: version 5.1 and 4.0. The 4.0 software is older and only runs on Windows 2000 and XP. The 5.1 version of the software runs on Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

The 4.0 version of the software allows you to view an FFT of the signal, the 5.1 version does not. For most people this is probably not a big deal.

The signal window in the 4.0 version flickers during update, it does not in the 5.1 version. Again, this isn’t really a big issue.

Version 5.1 allows you to specify phosphor persistence time, which is nice for observing jitter or variations in the signal pattern, the 4.0 version does not.

As can be seen from the screenshots, the layout of both versions i very much like that of an oscilloscope – nice and familiar, but I don’t think it is necessary to ape the “analog” interface for a digital acquisition unit.

As well, the screens are fixed size: 996x744, or so, for Version 4.0 and 984x603, or so, for Version 5.1 (the “or so” just means that depending on which version of Windows you are running and how the windows are decorated, the size may vary a few pixels). The size of the “scope” screen is 551x459 pixels for version 4.0 and 498x398 for version 5.1 (500x400 if you include the thin green border).

Version 4.0 “scope” display screen.

Version 4.0 FFT display screen.

Version 5.0 “scope” display screen.

However, after playing with it a little bit, I realized it was not quite like using a scope. The main “gripe” I have with it is that it does not display data in real time (as a scope would). Rather, it is a data acquisition unit that gathers 1500 samples and then sends them to the computer for display.

At a fast timebase setting, you get the familiar appearance of continuous signal flickering across the display. However, at slow timebase settings, it appears the software has hung since the display doesn’t appear to be updating at all.  It turns out that the display only updates once the 1500 sample buffer has been filled and sent to the PC. The “scope” samples at 50 samples per major graticule division. Ten divisions are displayed on screen with another 20 off screen (ten on either side of the displayed signal). With the timebase set to 1 second, this means it takes the scope 30 seconds to acquire the data before updating the screen – a little slow in my book. It would have been better if it sent samples in realtime at slower sweep speeds so the display is updated in realtime (even if this is hopelessly inefficient) . At higher sweep speeds, it is ok to collect all 1500 samples before sending them to the display.

On the other hand, this is a lot less expensive than a bench top scope, you get two channels, 200khz bandwidth, an external trigger, probes, and a ±10V input range. All of which is more than enough for most hobbyist work. Sure, I would love to have a 1Ghz scope, but I cannot justify the cost – especially since I know it will mostly be gathering dust.