DIY Oscilloscope Kit (20$) VS Regular DS Oscilloscope (400$)

if you are into electronics Then you probably already know that an oscilloscope is an indispensable tool when it comes to understanding circuits or creating your own. But my Rigol scope here or its improved successor is not really worth the $400 if you just want to measure the duty cycle of your pwm signal and don't care for the fancy mathematical functions like fft or for example cursor control Thankfully though cheap $20 oscilloscope kits can be found nearly everywhere nowadays and they offer decent features for the price So in this video let's find out whether such kits are really worth it, or whether you should throw them out the window Let's get started First off let's have a look at the insides of the package We got one bag with plenty of components to solder , a BNC to alligator clips test leads , a 2.4 inch tft LCD display, and finally the main PCB which has an arm based Stm32F as a core, but what I missed inside the package was a manual or some kind of instructions I found those eventually on the side of the original manufacturer jye tech and after printing them out I assorted my components into separate piles and turned on my soldering iron The chisel tip I'm using here is not the best one for the job But through the help of a steady hand tweezers and tons and tons of patience the smd soldering was not that difficult Simply put a bit of solder on both pads ,bring the resistor near them solder one side in place and then the other one by heating up both pads fast alternating the component almost finds the perfect spot by itself I used this schematic to identify which resistor value belongs to which pads, but you don't have to do this I simply ignored the fact that jye tech offers a surface mount assembly guide That is also the reason why I soldered the op-amp IC incorrectly during my first try I had to flip the orientation around at the end of the build Genius, I know after all those end parts I measured the resistance of the through-hole resistors, put them in a fitting place Soldered them to the board and snipped off the excess leads this procedure was pretty much the same for the capacitors , inductors Transistors switches and all the other complementary parts after three hours of this madness I soldered male headers to the tft display and added two additional Wires to the PCB in order to power it to my lab bench power supply which was set to 9 volts After a first successful voltage check I shorted the jumper four plugged in my display and enjoyed the first boot up of my new Oscilloscope , on the left side we can see the switches for the coupling modes and the sensitivity in case you didn't know it yet the AC Coupling removes the DC component of your signal and the ground coupling connects your signal input to ground Which is a good opportunity to adjust the line to the middle of the display But tuning the offsets the trigger voltage or the horizontal position is rather slow and sometimes even annoying because of the four button control the two sensitivity switches lower voltage range of 10 millivolts up to 5 volts per division Which is definitely good enough for hobbyists. The time base goes down up to 10 microseconds per division but to give you a more practical example let's connect the alligator clips to my frequency generator as You can see you're working with 100 Kilohertz signal is still possible But not a pleasure , the built-in measurement readouts also seem to work fine with this frequency But as you go up to 200 Kilohertz and Beyond It's starting to Act a bit crazy And it's certainly not usable for measurements a standard DSO on the other hands would have no problem of that But for simple things like finding out the duty cycle of your Arduino or other low-frequent periodic signals It does the job just fine it can even save one reading and spit it out whenever you want Which is a nice bonus. ok let's one to turn on or off Operations like charging up a capacitor I simply change the trigger mode to single and set the trigger voltage to around nine volts Now if I charge the capacitor without a resistor the output of my two oscilloscopes are pretty similar but once I started to charge it slowly through resistor the $20 kits refuses to trigger correctly and even if a does trigger I cannot change the time base during the hold mode Which is a pain in the ass because this way I have to scroll through the horizontal position and that takes forever But all in all I do like the kits for $20 you get a lot of features Which are not only helpful to in Hobbyist electronics projects But also great preparation when it comes to using the real deal and with its low current draw of roughly 110 milliamps it can easily be powered by 9-volt battery to make a portable , which might be a future project Anyway until then don't forget to like share and subscribe Check out the description if you want to buy one of those kits and support my channel simultaneously stay creative, and I will see you next time

Channel: GreatScott!

Views: 1,131,541

Keywords: oscilloscope, VS, DIY, diy, kit, DSO138, JYE tech, jye tech, compare, regular, dso, worth it, guide, buyer guide, beginner, electronics, greatscott, greatscott!, review, rigol, comparison, feature, features

Id: x19kwG-wJRI

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2016