At the budget end of the oscilloscope range lie the so-called pocket ‘scopes. About the size of a deck of cards, they combine a microcontroller and an LCD screen to make an instrument with a bandwidth in the tens of kilohertz and a not-too-sparkling performance. They’re something of a toy, but then again, if all that’s needed is a simple ‘scope for audio frequencies, they make a passable choice in a small package. Now [jgpeiro] has made one which is light years ahead of the toy kits, using a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 100 MHz ADC, and an effort to design a better input circuit.
At its simplest this could be a straightforward op-amp and ADC circuit feeding the Pico, but instead it has multiple stages carefully designed to offer the full bandwidth, and with gain, offset, and trigger settings being set by a series of DAC chips under software control. This and the decent bandwidth make this a much more viable oscilloscope, and one we’d like to see further developed.
By comparison, we took a look at the best of the competition a few years ago.
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