[time-nuts] A little quick advice, please
Magnus Danielson
magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Sun Oct 31 14:38:27 UTC 2010
On 10/31/2010 02:35 PM, William H. Fite wrote:
> 'morning, folks,
>
> I was just on a verge of purchasing a Tek TDS1012 scope when a friend
> suggested that I could save a chunk of change by buying a BitScope. Although
> I've been aware of PC scopes, I never really looked into them. The specs
> look pretty good (the fact that I was looking at an entry-level Tek will
> give you some idea of my needs).
>
> Anyone have any experience with BitScope or other of the low-end PC scopes?
Earlier experience with PC based boards is that their life-span is
limited due to software and hardware support reasons. Not all software
has survived from Win95 for instance. How many computers still have
ISA-bus? You run into all kinds of configuration hazzle rather than
measuring things.
So my personal experience is that it isn't as good as a free-standing
box, ready-to-go.
However, looking at BitScope they have a number of things done
differently which counteracts my comment. They have support for various
Windows AND various Linuxes. They also have the source-code, so you can
recompile it. With some effort it can be maintained, but without
reverse-engineering it. Also, the hardware interface is USB which seems
to be a fairly long-term interface. It looks like it will be around
another 10 years at least.
For many uses, I would still prefer the old oscilloscope interface if I
have one oscilloscope (I have several, ranging from 70thies up to the
90thies) but do value the possibility to interact with the scope in
various ways and more direct means to control it isn't a bad feature.
So my advice is that you need to figure out how you want to work, what
will be the best way of working. Can you lock up a computer at the
lab-bench? Do you have the screen-space to get all your data up
alongside the scope?
I would end up with both... eventually.
Cheers,
Magnus
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