Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Hardware Lab Bench? 215
50000BTU_barbecue writes "I made a comment a few days ago in a story basically saying the oscilloscope is dead. While that's a bit dramatic, I've found that over the last 20 years my oscilloscopes have been 'on' less and less. Instead, I use a combination of judicious voltage measurements, a logic analyzer and a decent understanding of the documentation of the gadget I'm working on. Stuff is just more and more digital and microcontroller-based, or just so cheap yet incredibly integrated that there's no point in trying to work on it. (I'm thinking RC toys for example. Undocumented and very cheap. Doesn't work? Buy another.) While I still do old-school electronics like circuit-level troubleshooting (on old test gear), that's not where the majority of hobbyists seem to be. Yet one thing I keep hearing is how people want an oscilloscope to work on hardware. I think it's just not that necessary anymore. What I use most are two regulated DC lab supplies, a frequency counter, a USB logic analyzer, a USB I2C/SPI master, and a USB-RS-232 dongle. That covers a lot of modern electronics. I have two oscilloscopes, a 100MHz two-channel stand-alone USB unit and a 1960s analog plug-in-based mainframe that is a '70s hacker dream scope. But I rarely use them anymore. What equipment do hardware folks out there use the most? And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?"
thats silly (Score:5, Informative)
need a pullup? a scope will show you
have fighting drivers? insufficient path to ground? noise on the rails?
if you're doing anything aside from poking at other peoples stuff thats cheap and
disposable, you need a scope
My desktop (Score:5, Informative)
On my office work bench:
Binocular microscope
soldering station
solder
flxes
large magnifying glass with light ring
project boxes full of SMD parts
tweezers
side cutters (dikes in the US)
scrap wire
storage scope/logic analyzer
power supply
In the other room:
cheap chinese reflow oven ,machine
cheap chinese stencil jig
(and if I can finally persuade my wife) cheap chinese pick and place
At this point I have to point out that almost all my best tools these days are cheap and from China, mostly bought off of aliexpress at prices maybe 10% of what I used to spend buying from the US - stuff I'd never ever have considered buying for myself 2-3 years ago. In this case being cheap and from China doesn't mean low quality or non-functional, quite the opposite.
Re:An O'Scope (Score:3, Informative)
If you're actually designing from scratch a new digital PCB, you can do without a lot of stuff but a 2GHz or faster O'scope is essential:
And Garmin International: 300MHz is for yesteryear, today most engineers need at least 1GHz to get by in digital design
Agreed if you're doing low speed stuff. But a 1GHz scope won't even do what you need for e.g. SATA. Better go up a bit more. For example, at work I've been measuring a DDR3 bus trying to track down some issues - nothing short of ~3GHz would be sufficient for that. And next year we'll be working with some 10Gbps signals which means our minimum high speed scope requirement is going to be 25GHz => equivalent to buying a decent house in most of the country(1). Of course that's a work project and the post sounds like 'home' projects which won't need the state of the art. If you're looking at some basic GPIOs, or an I2C bus, the slower speed scope would be sufficient.
Also, pay atttention to the probes you buy. If you get low bandwidth probes, then you aren't using the full potential of the scope. For example using a 300MHz probe with a 1GHz scope means that you can see signals up to about 300MHz and that 800MHz memory bus will look like crap at best.
1) Debug of Switching Power Supplies [could get by with 100Mhz scope for this...]
Close enough for most boards although if you're on the very edge you might want 500MHz {The boards ability to decouple power can go a little past 100MHz so you need to be able to measure noise up to that point.} 1+GHz scopes aren't needed for measuring things like power when you can't control frequencies that high from your board.
Other tools are gravy... [Though clearly a power supply is non-negotiable...]
Don't forget a good soldering station and microscope. The soldering station is needed for power and tip interchangeability (big tips for big parts, tiny tips for tiny parts) and the microscope is needed to see what you're doing when you try to solder those tiny parts.
(1) Scope costs seem to be roughly $10k/GHz. And then you'll need probes to go with that at $7k+ each.
Re:thats silly (Score:5, Informative)
For most digital work these days, you really just need a logic analyzer.
Unless your logic analyzer can show you ringing or capacitance / inductance problems on the digital signal lines, this is not really true. "Digital" signals on a circuit board are analog after all, and are subject to a lot of the same gremlins that plague an all analog circuit. This sort of thing doesn't always matter in a digital circuit, but you need a good scope to find them when they cause problems.