Turn a standard oscilloscope into a solder-in one

11 Feb 2022

Turn a standard oscilloscope into a solder-in one

This is a reaction post on baldengineer's excellent Workbench Wednesdays 50: DIY Solder-In Oscilloscope Probes.
There have been several posts here on the community to related to the topic, like this one from shabaz: Building Solderable In-Circuit Oscilloscope Probes (the design that inspired James), Andrew J's solution with ferrules and this one from me: DIY $10 Solder-in Oscilloscope Probe.

I was thinking about a simpler one that uses an off-the-shelf probe, keeps impedance, compensation and x1/x10 intact, and does not destroy the probe. Battle of the probe techniques ...
I came up with this design:

Making it took 7 minutes. Filming a lot more :).
Also kudo's to W2AEW because virtually every technique comes from one of his videos.

Result:

Top Comments

Jan Cumps over 3 years ago in reply to shabaz +1

I've tagged this for the Circuit Prototype Techniques month. I've just seen that there are good entries for it already .

Jan Cumps over 3 years ago in reply to shabaz

I've tagged this for the Circuit Prototype Techniques month.
I've just seen that there are good entries for it already .
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Jan Cumps over 3 years ago in reply to Andrew J

I think an advantage is that it requires no skills or special tools. The components are the two leads of 1 resistor, two Dupont wires and a bit of heatshrink. Tape would work too.

The probe can be a jellybean one.
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Andrew J over 3 years ago

It's useful to have those dupont connectors on the end so that you can plug in the soldered part of the board connection which then becomes sacrificial, rather than having to rebuild the probe tip soldered parts. It looks like you have to sacrifice a probe to the technique though - I guess you have spares. I did think it would be cool to use a female co-ax terminator given that probe comes apart but of course you then lose the x1/x10 feature of the probe
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Jan Cumps over 3 years ago

Scope capture of the Arduino USB clock:

I used AC coupling because my scope's trigger doesn't deal well with MHz range signals with DC offset.
Standard acquisition settings, and using the hardware frequency counter.
This image will not be better than using the pig-tail probing technique. But it offers hands-free operation.
It's definitely better compared to using the crocodile probe ground lead.
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shabaz over 3 years ago in reply to beacon_dave

Such a pain to use : ) I have the cheap version of tool for those sleeves, presumably a more higher-end tool would make life easier! and I don't have 100% success rate, sometimes I'll accidentally split the sleeve. But really cool once it does work.
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