Oscilloscopes are one of our favorite tools for electronics development. They make the hidden dances of electrons visually obvious to us, and give us a clear understanding of what’s actually going on in a circuit.
The question few of us ever ask is, how do they work? Most specifically—how do you design a circuit that’s intended to measure another circuit? Aleksa Bjelogrlic has pondered that very idea, and came down to explain it all to us at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
All Up Front
Aleksa’s scope design had humble beginnings.
Aleksa has spent five years designing an open-source oscilloscope known as the ThunderScope. He wanted an oscilloscope that could measure a circuit while streaming out samples at speed to a computer, so he decided to build his own. His idea was to put the analog part of a high-speed scope in a box, while offloading the digital processing to an attached computer. This would allow the software side of things to be regularly updated to stay with the times. It would be easy to add new triggers or protocol decoders to the setup without having to mess with the hardware.
His early experiments saw him streaming samples from a test scope he built, but it wasn’t perfect. He used USB 3 Gen 1, but it was only giving him 350 MB/s transfer rates. He needed closer to 1 GB/sec to properly stream samples of high-speed signals. He also had issues with his front-end design, with poor frequency response. He soon switched over to PCI-Express for higher transfer r ..
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