Ask HN: Recommend a portable oscilloscope

I find myself with a need for something like this:

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/micro-digital-storage-oscilloscopedso-nano-p-512.html

To give an idea of the kind of thing I need it for, the first thing I'm going to do with it is monitor the voltage over time at my car battery, as I suspect the alternator is not working as well as it should at idle revs. My simple multimeter won't do, as I have reason to believe the voltage isn't steady, and that's what interests me about it.

The DSO nano looks like it'd do the job, but I'm hesitant to buy one without asking opinions or seeing if anyone knows of any alternatives.

My need is for a relatively simple oscilloscope, ideally with more than one input channel (two would be fine). It's not for logic analysis work, and would need to be portable and battery powered (ideally, more or less hand held). Does anyone have experience with the DSO nano or an alternative device?

2 comments

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basicxman 15y ago ↗

If you're just looking for an advanced logic analyzer, http://www.saleae.com/logic/ is relatively cheap and pretty awesome. Linux and Mac OS X versions of the software coming soon I believe. It also includes an SDK so it's awesome for programmers.

It's about the size of the new iPod Nano and comes with a carrying case to store the modular leads, and USB cable.

EDIT: Before people flame, yes this product is pretty different from the OP's link, however it might be somewhat what s/he's looking for.

hooeezit 15y ago ↗

Looks like you need more than just an oscilloscope - you need a trend recorder. The DSO Nano is a great for casual work, but if you have some electronics skill, you can easily build an attenuator to hook into your laptop's microphone or line-in (1 channel or 2 channel) jack and record the signal for trend analysis. You can also use an MP3 player with recording abilities as long as it records to a WAV file, not MP3 directly.

Take a look at these links: http://www.ledametrix.com/oscope/index.html http://www.zelscope.com/

And if you grow out of it, this is a very hackable, real oscilloscope for an affordable price: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.30573

Here is info on hacking the Rigol to make it a 100MHz scope: http://mightyohm.com/blog/2010/03/rigol-ds1052e-50mhz-to-100...