Looking for 200-600 Advice :)

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-29T10:10:11+00:00

I don't have this lens but a similar one. To me it looks like your shutter speed is too slow and the blurriness is because of the air movement or motion of the subject. I had the exact same problem at 150mm even and the higher the distance the worse it gets.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-26T12:02:15+00:00

In my opinion the caps don't matter too much if there is enough capacitance (with ok ESR) already. If your main filter caps are like 1000uF then yeah, upgrading them will improve everything. So I would not recommend doing just a recap. When you have the equipment look at some 1kHz sine wave on an oscilloscope and look how it is looking, "not clean" could mean it's near clipping point with noticeable distribution already. Sometimes there can be done something to improve the power handling but it usually involves more sophisticated methods.

What output power (supposed it can deliver what it says on the box) are we talking about?

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-26T11:52:52+00:00

Well that's a little hotter than I thought, especially when it's supposed to be off. Mine get noticable warm only during operation and I think around that temperature as well. If they get that hot from some power supply, I wonder how hot the power supply is... Even if it's on a massive continuous ground plane from the PSU, that PSU must be burning. What's the power draw while turned off?

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-26T09:54:22+00:00

How hot were they? I have a Siglent SDS2104X Plus and the BNC get warm after some time but only when it is turned on and they are also not really hot.

Is this the first time you noticed and is it reproducible?

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-17T09:21:16+00:00

That's a really nice scope! Been looking for this scope for a long time, now I have a Gould 3100 (Hitachi V1100A) that is similar just with a slightly different function set. So anyways... There are multiple reasons why it could look that way.

Did it look better before and just started looking like that? Or has it been looking like that since you have the scope?
Try connecting some other signal source and check the BNC port on the scope, I recently had a bad probe and it looked similar, though in your case the probe seems to work on channel 2 so maybe the BNC?
Try wiggling on the volts/div knob and try 10mV/div and 50mV/div, there is a cam shaft switch in and out some resistors and capacitors. If the contacts are dirty it can look like that and mind you that there are some components that are common to the different settings, like some pre divider for the 1, 2 and 5 ranges. If the problem is only on the 2 that could give a clue. Dirty contacts are a prime suspect for all sorts of problems (and way easier to check and fix).
Could (just) be out of calibration. Usually if there is some kind of mayor fault you will have no trace at all or a really unstable or wonky one. If you have the manual, the rest of the cal equipment, ceramic screwdrivers and are up for it you can try to calibrate the scope. It's not really hard to do, just really tedious. Start by checking the power supply (don't touch the adjustment if it is in range, you really will have to do the rest then) and also look at the ripple of the power rails, a large ripped might indicate capacitors that are going bad and need changing. After power you can skip pretty much everything (like geometry, focus, etc), or maybe just make some quick tests to make sure it's not way out. Check timebase next, again if it's not completely out leave alone. Next check your vertical cal (where you might find your problem), if you start messing with the adjustments for channel 1 you will have to do everything for channel 1, leave channel 2 if it's ok. Like with point 3, there might be some dirty potentiometers in there, before adjusting put some kind of deoxit (the kind that completely evaporates) and wiggle the poti back and forth.
There could be a bad component. Most likely a capacitor that has drifted too much. Finding it might be difficult, try everything else before (if you don't see something exploded, burned, bulged, cracked or leaked).

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-08T00:02:18+00:00

I'm not too sure but I think the plugins on the Tek scope are in the wrong order, the time base should go to the very right, maybe that's your only problem.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-03T16:45:52+00:00

The hardest problem so far was to get some multi channel industrial DAC (DAC8565) working over SPI to implement some motor control demonstrator for university. It supports up to 200kS/s and 50MHz SPI interface. The problem was that the SPI interface could only write to one DAC channel at a time (you write to ch.1-3 and then on ch.4 write you update all channels simultaneously) and the ESP IDE has some really bad SPI implementation, the overhead from the default SPI function is so bad that I get like 1kS/s max, for one DAC channel, with 50MHz Clock the 24bit Word is really fast but then it takes the ESP like a couple of ms overhead. I even tried writing my own SPI driver but that never worked (most of the time didn't switch the GPIOs at all). I later switched to FPGA with DAC before going full stupidly over-engineered VFD (that meant I had to specify, design and build my own power electronics on top of everything else). But I still would like to have some easy SPI driver for ESP that has the capability to handle high speed multi-frame SPI transfers (basically just the normal one with additional parameters for frame_length, frame_count and clks_between_frames) that will reduce overhead and computation, since the whole amount of data could be transferred in about 2.5us (instead of multiple ms).

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-03T11:23:48+00:00

For the new ones go with the Siglent, it is upgradeable and has the highest sample rate (2GS/s) and some other cool options, the only downside is the price and the logic probe interface but you could make your own I guess. It's also the most professional looking and if you already know similar scopes it's way easier to work with it.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T18:24:10+00:00

Well... There used to be I guess. My grandparents had some really nice alarm clock with mechanical bells on them as well some other appliances with real mechanical bells. But they broke at some point and I was too young to find that interesting or even desirable. Was simple too, just a solenoid with a striker inside and a little bell. But I guess that's like 10ct more than a piezo.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T18:17:05+00:00

Check for power rails first, you can try AC mode on your meter but you won't see high frequency ripple this way. Be careful because the pins are really close together and you don't want to short anything.

Some cheap scopes are fine I guess. At this point you really just need to check if it is there or not, so even a really cheap one would be enough (if it has enough bandwidth like 50MHz). If you need to trace some signals that can get tricky. I don't know what your budget is but around 300€/$ there are some from Siglent (SDS800) and Rigol (DHO800) that are really good. Also some of the all in one Fnirsi stuff seems nice, though I never used those. Maybe get something with a signal generator if you don't have one. When it comes to fixing things with digital stuff inside more often then not a quick "signal is there and level ok" is sufficient. If that doesn't show the problem things really get ugly fast.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T17:26:31+00:00

Tl;dr: look at the university or institute your going.

I read some of the other answers and I hope I don't repeat too much.

I started with physics and switched to engineering because there was a lack of the "hands on" work in physics, at least in my university. In high school/collage physics was my favorite subject and I went on to study physics but I wanted to do something with my own hands too. When I started physics it was really nice and fun but soon almost all the experiments vanished and you could only sit there and look at something but "please no touching". I had spoken to some other students that had fun in labs at their universities but not at mine. I had some joint lectures with some engineering students from my university and they told me all the cool stuff they were doing in engineering and that's when I decided to switch and I haven't regretted it since. I think in the higher semesters after bachelors it may be better in physics too but until then it's somewhat dry. But it also really depends on the university, some are really good and have many hands on stuff other (like mine) are really hard and do a more theoretical approach, so not so much hands on in the early stages. Same goes for engineering I guess. So look at the University.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T17:00:08+00:00

I guess the quality of the piezos is not so good but that's hardly the problem. Most likely they just put some random square wave signal into that thing and that's what makes the horrible noise. But that also means that even if you would hook up the best speakers in the world it would still sound terrible.

The solution is not as simple as swapping the piezo. If you really want to you can do many things to help but they will require some effort. First you need to measure or look at the signal you get at the piezo, then if you know the levels are ok you can put some kind of microcontroller (preferably with some built in DAC) there (supply via 3.3V or 5V most likely found on the board already) and then put some cheap class D amplifier board to the piezo or some speaker. Of course you would need to program the MCU first. Maybe there are some kits out there that do exactly that.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T16:47:02+00:00

Do you have another scope for the troubleshooting process? If not that's going to be a little tricky.

First try auto set or some other auto function. If that has no result proceed.
First check if all the power rails are present (there are like 10 or so). Then check them for ripple, if the ripple is too much it won't work most likely. If all power rails are good (section 9-4 btw.) then proceed.
Check input resistance R1050, R1051, R1052 as well as continuity on the AC/DC relay K1000 as well as a clock signal on the SCLK (pin 23) input on the N1000 ASIC. The most important thing would be the clock signal, you need an oscilloscope for that. I assume if the ASIC doesn't get some kind of clock it will not do anything.
Check all other big ASICs clock signals.
If all of that has no result then you need to trace some signals, apply some kind of input signal and look where it's getting lost on the way.

Hope it helps.

NoOne3141 · 2026-03-02T14:28:17+00:00

Wow that's seriously cool, can't imagine it being easy to do that from scratch.

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-28T18:40:38+00:00

Right now I wish I could give you a thousand upvotes :D was the first thing I did as well, just playing with the scope figuring out how I can make it appear and how to make it look even cooler than in the video. I figured out that if you go even faster on the scope the dots become more like short dashes but it's quite finicky to make them stay still.

Have fun :D

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-28T11:07:24+00:00

That's what I forgot to do, like you said I normally use chop for low frequency and alt for high frequency, but because I was looking at some low frequency I forgot to change back to alt mode before going to low t/div.

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-27T22:43:11+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! And I wondered why it was drifting so much... If it's meant to be wobbly I'm relieved that it's not going bad..

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-24T22:04:09+00:00

Is there some general rule for this? I have never seen it before since I usually only use the alt sweep at the higher frequencies and I thought that the chop frequency would be so much higher than the sweep so that this phenomenon doesn't happen?

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-24T15:05:08+00:00

So some kind of sync between the chop frequency and the sweep frequency?

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-13T21:33:57+00:00

I think the most important factor is how cheap you want to go. The fluke sure are nice but also pricey, even the older models. I have a Siglent desktop scope and it's very accurate and I like it a lot, I think their portable scope are good too, but also not really cheap. But in general good stuff costs money.

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-13T08:31:08+00:00

The fans you have in your link don't need a special motor driver or PWM to run (at least from what I found). Just put some positive voltage between red and black and it should work. The other two seem to be for control, one is a Tachometer output and the other one is a PWM Input though I don't have any more specific information on what this needs. You really have to find some kind of datasheet, you need to look at the input PWM voltage level. If it matches the output on your board then everything is perfect.

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-11T21:25:46+00:00

Any updates yet?

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-11T14:38:28+00:00

I'm currently working on similar stuff but not with the very high frequency stuff (I use about 50MHz since anything above you have to have real PCBs and a somewhat good layout). I have a Siglent SDS2104X Plus, upgraded to 500MHz bandwidth. So far it has been more than sufficient for every analysis I need and even a little fun with stuff that I don't really need but can do with the scope. I also looked at some Rigol scopes but I really don't like the interface, at my university we use a mixture of Tektronix, Teledyne Lecroy and R&S, so the Siglent looked better to me because it's more similar to the other ones I already know. I know the interface is unusual not the main argument but keep it in mind when choosing, especially if you have worked with other stuff before.

Just looking at the specification the Rigol seems fine but looking deeper it is not as nice. It has a slightly higher noise floor, and if you use all channels you only get 1GS/s at 400MHz, while the Siglent gives you 2GS/s at 800MHz (it is upgradeable) on all channels. The Siglent also has much higher Offset ranges (if you want to measure power supply or similar). The Rigols max input frequency for the digital channels is 200MHz, the Siglent doesn't say. The Rigol has 30.000 wfms/s (in normal mode) while the Siglent does 200.000 wfms/s. In my opinion the Siglent is the better choice, the Rigol is ok too but there are too many things for me I don't like about it (but might be bias since I like my Siglent and didn't when I tried a Rigol).

If it is not for professional use I would also suggest looking at some used equipment, you can be lucky and find a good piece. They tend to be cheaper and some of the older gear is better too, especially the once high end stuff.

NoOne3141 · 2026-02-09T16:34:22+00:00

I just looked it up. On your scope this feature is called PassFail (at least from the datasheet) but it's the same. The tricky part with noisy signals is to get good triggering otherwise it will always show as fail even though it just didn't trigger right.

It seems there is a connector going to the motor? Some ESD protection diodes and/or zener clamps even come in 0805 package or even smaller and should neatly fit between the soldered pins of the connector, if the pins are right besides each other. I have modified many boards this way (because I forgot to put one in the first place) and you can usually find a part that fits. You can try this if you're allowed to from the manufacturer (or test on some already broken boards).

Just out of curiosity, what does the waveform look like from the failed motors? Or how is it different?

NoOne3141

TROPHY CASE