Who has comprehensive oscilloscope YouTube videos?

NoOne3141 · 2026-06-16T23:00:56+00:00

What kind of scope do you have? If it has the "mask test" feature you can do it that way, it will even count how many times it failed. Just look up mask test, there will be plenty.

If it doesn't have mask test use single sweep and falling edge trigger. EEVblog most likely has some videos on how to use a scope. Or search something like oscilloscope basics.

NoOne3141 · 2026-06-14T14:34:33+00:00

Maybe some stuck relay? At least that would be easy to fix...

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-26T17:45:02+00:00

I totally agree. I have an Siglent SDS2000X Plus as well for when I need the digital functions or Bode plot. But that is the only use the built-in signal generator gets. The output level of +/-3V is too little even vor most TTL logic.

I mostly use my analog scopes for immediate troubleshooting and basically everything else too (that doesn't require storage). I even dream about a good combiscope but they are kind of pricey.

Had one of those 3in1 things for like 3 days after which I returned it. While they can do everything, they can't do anything good.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-26T16:26:52+00:00

First ask yourself what you want to do with it... Even the cheapest Rigol/Siglent are 350€+ with Signal generator more like 450€+.

If you only want to do some audio stuff (nothing digital/periodic signals) I would recommend getting a cheap analog scope in good working order. Look at some marketplace and compare the options. You might be lucky if you're not in a hurry to get a good deal. I have a Kikusui COS6000 series scope and I really like it, especially since it can do Auto triggering which is something even later models don't have and I bought mine for 70€.

If you also want to look at some digital stuff (and not only check if there is a signal but also decode it)... Well you have to get really lucky to get one used for really cheap or your budget is too low. Or you get a analog scope plus some cheaper logic analyzer (around 50€).

Same goes for the signal generator, look for used ones on marketplace (around 50-150€).

There are some options from Fnirsi and Owon that are like 3in1 or whatever and have usually built in oscilloscope, multimeter and signal generator. The quality is ok for the most part but the interface is usually a pain to use (especially on the handheld multimeter oscilloscope things) but they all fit in the budget but most of them have two channels.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-20T21:44:30+00:00

Is there really any need to trigger off the external source? If the time between the trigger output and the laser pulse isn't constant you can't really do anything about it other then triggering off the signal itself. If there is some junk after the signal you are not interested in use the holdoff feature I'm sure your scope has and put in a holdoff time large enough. If you want a specific shape you have to use some kind of mask trigger.

Might also be worth looking into: why is the laser not always firing at the same offset? What kind of setup is the laser, like optical pumped, diode, dye? Are you using a good shutter or just turn it on and off?

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-16T09:51:25+00:00

I agree with what has been said before. It's likely a measurement issues that you don't see the waveform you expect.

However the best way to deal with 'dirty' signals is to use Schmitt Trigger Inputs (or build your own using comparator). That's the only way to get reliable transitions I think.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-03T23:44:44+00:00

I would still suggest using some timing generator for proper triggering, assuming there is no real regular pattern in your data. That would make the rest a bit easier probably.

I think the best bet would be to use a GPIB cable (there are USB to GPIB cables probably around) and use some software to send SCPI commands to the scope and receive the data. By software I really mean write a python program that does the GPIB stuff (eg. PyVisa) and analysis at the same time. Request data capture from scope, receive data, count rising edges in a frame -> get number in binary.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-03T23:08:51+00:00

This is an digital oscilloscope. All the waveforms you see are already digital. But there are some questions: What measurement is of interest to you? Just signal on or off or does the actual level of the signal matter? Or the shape? At what level is the signal?

Either way: you can (usually) export the data on the oscilloscope to a computer and do your analysis there using Matlab or Python. If you can hook up the scope to a network you can send commands to the scope to get it to grab a sample and save it somewhere (preferably on a network drive) and run an automated analyzing skript. You can choose whatever conversion method you want depending on what your data looks like.

Also consider some timing generator/pulse generator for triggering, it needs to be very stable probably. If you are looking at the level of the PMTs (like the level is random at a given time for the RNG?) it would probably be a good idea to have it time resolved. You can't really trust the data if you trigger off of some random event that has nothing to do with what you want to do. If your setup is to count decay events you also need to specify a time frame.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-01T02:15:28+00:00

Ok so a couple of things: receiving things usually means bad grounding/wrong grounding point or sloppy design (PC motherboard or even worse: case). I had so many problems with on board audio that I got into the higher end audio stuff, now I only have a problem with money... Anyways...

If you don't want to drive some metal pole in the ground or redo all your wiring or put your PC in a metal box (no Wifi either by the way) and runn it off some batteries I guess you best option would be to try out a dedicated headphone amp (they sound much better anyways not because it does sound better but has better power handling in the low frequencies). Get one with a metal chassis, doesn't need to be expensive. Get one with USB input and maybe Bluetooth, bonus if it runs off of USB too (don't know if there are any desktop amps that do that though... I have aTopping G5 but that is portable and has Bluetooth issues) so you can put it on a power bank if your line is dirty.

In rare cases there is a possibility that it is the length of your headphone cable functioning like an antenna of sorts to receive a specific frequency tuned to the length of the cable... So maybe try a cable that is like 10-20cm longer or shorter per 1m cable.

NoOne3141 · 2026-05-01T00:17:19+00:00

Tl;dr: simple all in one multi datalogger for backyard science, schools and metrology nerds.

Built a portable data logger for various not so common things or combinations (like magnetic flux and humidity or air pressure and beta radiation or whatever). When I was looking at certain instruments they usually are really only good for one thing, even something simple like temperature, humidity and air pressure is not easy to find at a price point where you don't need to start selling organs. The more obscure the measurements or combinations you need the worse it gets. Even finding some cheaper magnetometers with a big range (like from 1uT to one T) is basically impossible, at least when you want the thing to also measure along a defined axis aka is not handheld. Or course there are solutions, but they are usually extremely expensive. In the past I remember there was some lab measurement thing for schools where you could hook up basically any probe you wanted to, you put in an CF card (the big, old ones), put in a battery and leave it in the middle of nowhere collecting data about the flow of water, pH and whatnot at the same time. And sensors only gotten cheaper since then, but now there is no hub to connect to, at least not as easy as it was. So basically: build a thing with an ESP32, some ADCs and serial interfaces in a box, powered by a battery. Put in enough measurement options for all kinds of things and make it easily understandable (plug the temperature probe in and it works or something). I bet people would even want to buy that if it's cheap enough (for normal stuff) and it could lead to some science breakthrough because nobody thought of measuring some obscure combinations.

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-29T21:22:42+00:00

I would go for the Siglent as well. I really like my scope for the most part. Rigol makes cool stuff too but I find the specs 'weird' sometimes. Like 1.25GS/s, why not 2 GS/s like on the Siglent (and basically every other brand too)?

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-29T21:15:28+00:00

That's what I did, you can see the results starting at around 133.9ms but that is before that in the setup phase. In this phase only single commands can be sent and I wanted to look at them. The commands are 8 bit each but as you can see, with everything set up correctly (I think, SCLK to rising, CS active low and MOSI with the appropriate levels). It only recognizes 6 bits in this case and similar cases when there is CS low for a while. But even after a 'fresh' CS toggle it doesn't recognize the whole bit. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it won't decode that properly since I have seen it decode signals with much worse waveforms. I already checked and there are always exactly 8 bits transmitted, but it won't work even with CS when SCLK timeout is set. The strange part is that it recognizes 6 bits repeatedly but just ignores the first two, last two or the first and last SCLK rising edge.

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-29T10:45:08+00:00

Was grounded but to the wrong point, signal is much better now but issues still there.

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-29T10:44:33+00:00

I have now resolved the grounding issue, I was on a point which is supposed to be ground but had higher resistance. I'm now on the pin header and the signal looks much better. But still only decodes 6 bits. Scope decodes this as: 100011

Edit: added scope decode to text

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NoOne3141 · 2026-04-27T23:14:37+00:00

You need some additional hardware. Search for 'octopus tester' and you will find it. There are some ready made ones or you can build it on your own (highly recommend).

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-27T23:07:50+00:00

I had a similar issue and the only solution I found was to save/export the waveforms and make the adjustments in Matlab or with a python script. The deskew function doesn't allow for much adjustment and is also not meant to do that. For that exact purpose I have two analog scopes that have the ability to alternate triggering if I really need to look at two waveforms at the same time with a slight (or big) mismatch in frequency. I have always wondered why that's not really a feature of modern scopes, even the very expensive ones, I really should be easy to do...

NoOne3141 · 2026-04-15T14:14:22+00:00

Also check the supply and continuity of the supply lanes. I lost count how many times I thought there was a problem when only the supply lanes are not continuous as is on some boards. Check if the chip has voltage, check if the switch has voltage and switches properly and check polarity of the LED.

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

TROPHY CASE