As I’ve mentioned before, an oscilloscope is a pretty nifty piece of test equipment. It can also be very expensive.
The following comment in my series on oscilloscopes is still a good summary of what it’s all about, IMO:
Oscilloscopes are the “printf” of the electronics world. Without a “scope” you can only predict and deduce what’s happening in a circuit, not actually verify (let alone “see”) it. Here’s what an oscilloscope does: on the vertical axis, you see what happens, on the horizontal axis you see when it happens. It’s a voltmeter plus time-machine.
That doesn’t mean you can’t get anything done in Physical Computing without one. A simple multimeter is a lot cheaper and will get you a long way in figuring out the electrical behavior of a circuit – not to mention finding shorts and connection mistakes. So the first thing to get is a multimeter, not a scope. Always.
The trouble is that ATmega’s are so friggin’ darn fast. We can’t observe events on their time scale, and more importantly: many problems will zoom past us and get lost before we have a chance to see anything!
So I’m going to revise my advice about oscilloscopes somewhat: if you solder together kits and basic components, then yeah, a multimeter is plenty. But if you hook up non-trivial chips and need to debug the combination of hardware and software, then you really need all the help you can get. Be it a logic analyzer for digital signals, buses, and pulse-trains, or a scope to investigate the electric behavior of a fast circuit.
Note that a logic analyzer can be a lot cheaper than a scope. The reason being that they are electrically much simpler – they just need to collect a bunch of digital logic levels (rapidly), whereas a scope needs to collect much richer signals (ranging from millivolts to hundreds of volts, and with all sorts of signal processing to make sure you’re seeing the real thing and not some artifact of the instrument itself).
If you’ve been following this weblog a bit, you’ll have seen quite a few scope screen shots in some of the posts. One of the most important uses for my scope here at JeeLabs is to figure out power consumption while trying to optimize a JeeNode’s ultra-low power mode. Power consumption is an analog thing, so that’s where a scope comes in. And when you look at the amount of detail a modern scope can show, it’s clear that this level of insight really comes from such an instrument.
See the recent Watchdog tweaking and Room Node analysis for some examples.
Does that mean you have to shell out a few thousand dollars to do something similar? Not at all.
First of all, visualization isn’t everything. A couple of years ago, I used one JeeNode to measure the power consumption of another JeeNode, see the Power consumption tracker post, and the software for it. Less insight perhaps, and no geeky screen shots, but plenty of info to try and optimize the power consumption by trial-and-error. Just tweak your sketch and measure, over and over again.
Second point I’d like to make, is that such power measurements are fairly slow, so any scope will do. Even a 10 MHz model will be able to accurately display changes from one microsecond to the next.
There are a couple of ways to get such a “low-end” scope (don’t let that term fool you, any oscilloscope can be extremely useful as long as things don’t change too fast):
- Look for a second-hand unit, lots of them can often be found on eBay.
- Consider getting a USB-connected scope such as the DSO-2090.
- For PC’s there is software to create a basic scope using the sound card.
- Check out the ultra-tiny Xmegalab, its under $50 (plus shipping).
These last two options are lower cost, but more limited since they don’t really include a full “front-end” to handle a wide range of input voltages. For circuits with only a few volts, they may still be sufficient.
Normal “sweeping” analog scopes are ok, but storage scopes (analog or digital) are considerably better because you can “capture” an event and keep it on the screen to investigate. Such a feature will cost more though.
Here’s an example of how a €100 second-hand Tek 475 (analog & non-storage) scope can be used to measure that same power consumption as in the Watchdog tweaking post – it’s the same waveform:

Two essential tricks were used: 1) the watchdog is firing at ≈ 60 Hz, so the scope trace fires constantly, and 2) it triggers on one pulse but displays the next one, using x10 horizontal magnification.
The above screen shows 2 mA and 200 µs per division. The vertical scale could have been zoomed in further, but for the horizontal scale I’m sort of at the limit unless I start using delayed sweeps. Here’s the whole unit:

No storage, no screen capture, no USB, so this was done by darkening the room and holding a camera in front of the scope. It took a couple of tries, but hey – it is possible to estimate power consumption this way!
What I’m trying to say is that you too can do this sort of work with an investment of €100 to €150.
If you intend to do more with electronics (and let me assure you: this sort of fooling around is geek heaven, and addictive!) – then consider holding off just a bit longer if need be, and save up for a Rigol or Owon scope. These “DSO’s” are mature, have tons of useful features, and they can store lots of detail (that’s the “S” in DSO).
Is this a case of “if you have a hammer then everything starts looking like a nail”? All I know is that my insight in ultra-low power consumption and optimization has increased significantly since getting an oscilloscope.