RE: Introducing the OpenScope MZ

balearicdynamics — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 05:28:40 GMT

Reading the documentation the two concepts of open scope and the Bitscope / Picoscope families forks and differ a lot. While the (supposed) terms of comparison are primarily measuring instruments and focus their features in this direction with - at least on the Bitscope I am using by a while - good performances and quality including price vs performances this is a totally different approach, no matter it is open.

IMHO the suffix "scope" is relatively meaningful respect the entire board design. As a matter of fact if you plan to use this board as a measuring instrument you will pay double or more respect Pico with the same measuring characteristics;

2x scope channels with 12 bits @ 2 MHz bandwidth and up to 6.25MS/s sampling rate
1x function generator output with 1 MHz bandwidth and up to 10MS/s update rate

These seems to be just the two measuring instrumentation features. All the rest is the programmability option, internal memory, microcontroller based architecture at a - reasonable - speed. It seems me on the first sight an almost advanced development board with just a small plus. Better to classify it in the microcontroller boards / development boards with some measuring features. Remain to see how much programming space and MCU compute power remain when it is working for measuring.

My first impression is that it is a very good board not so useful as a measuring instrument - take a look to the depth features and pinout specifications in the mentioned Getting Started guid - but a great hardware debugging simulation-and-feedback circuit. In this range it sounds really a great board and probably covers the average/low price area of this kind of products. It will be nice to test just in this kind of working environments.

Enrico

RE: Introducing the OpenScope MZ

DAB — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 18:14:48 GMT

How does it compare with Picoscope and Bitscope on price and performance?

DAB