Collaborate Disseminate
Probes are an essential component of a good oscilloscope system, but they have the nasty habit of cluttering up your workbench. If you have a four-channel scope, it’s not just …read more Continue reading Clever Scope Probe Drawers Keep Your Workbench Tidy
If you want to measure AC or DC current with an oscilloscope, a current clamp is a great way to do it. The clamp surrounds the wire, so you don’t need to break the connection to take your measurements. These used to be expensive, although we’ve seen some under $100, if you shop. We don’t know if it was cost or principle that motivated [Electronoobs] to build his own current clamp, but he did.
This probe design is little more than a 3D printed case, an old power supply toroid, and a conventional alligator clamp to make the business end. …read more
It’s not often that we are shown an entirely new class of test equipment here at Hackaday, so it was with some surprise that we recently received the new O-scope Mayer offering. If your most simple piece of test equipment is your own finger, able to measure temperature, detect voltage, and inject a 50 or 60 Hz sine wave, then what they have done is produce a synthetic analogue with a calibrated reading. The idea is that where previously you could only say “Too hot!”, or “High voltage!”, you should now be able to use their calibrated probe to gain …read more
Continue reading Review: The O-scope Mayer D4/WG5 Calibrated Fleshy Test Probe
The oscilloscope is probably the most versatile piece of test equipment you can have on your electronics bench, offering a multitude of possibilities for measuring timing, frequency and voltage as well as subtleties in your circuits revealed by the shape of the waveforms they produce.
On the front of a modern ‘scope is a BNC socket, into which you can feed your signal to be investigated. If however you simply hook up a co-axial BNC lead between source and ‘scope, you’ll immediately notice some problems. Your waveforms will be distorted. In the simplest terms your square waves will no longer …read more
Continue reading How An Oscilloscope Probe Works, And Other Stories
These magical creatures crop up out of nowhere and fry your electronics or annoy your ear holes. Understanding them will doubtless save you money and hassle. The ground loop in a nutshell is what happens when two separate devices (A and B) are connected to ground separately, and then also connected to each other through some kind of communication cable with a ground, creating a loop. This provides two separate paths to ground (B can go through its own connection to ground or it can go through the ground of the cable to A and then to A’s ground), and …read more
Fancy measurement gear is often expensive to buy, but some bits of kit are entirely DIY’able if you’re willing to put a little work into the project. [Christer Weinigel] needed to get some measurements of a differential clock signal that was ticking away around 500 MHz. El-cheapo probes aren’t going to cut it here. They won’t have the bandwidth and most off-the-rack probes are single-ended, that is they’re referenced to ground. [Christer] needed the difference between two balanced signals, neither of which is grounded. In short, [Christer] needed a high-frequency active differential oscilloscope probe, and they’re not cheap. So he …read more
Continue reading DIY Active Sub-GHz Differential Scope Probe
