Thread: Portable Oscilloscope value?

Ive always just done them with a protec 406 which is a fancy digital mulitmeter that.

I know someone who's getting a Nano for fathers day, mostly for monitoring pwm signals.

Originally Posted by Graeme

I know someone who's getting a Nano for fathers day, mostly for monitoring pwm signals.

Which model ?

The Nano - basic but adequate if its any good. The pwm duty/Hz functions on my multimeter don't work sometimes so thought I'd try one of these instead of another multi-meter.

Yes those portable small scopes do have some value, although some what limited.
I know a few techs who use them to do very quick checks before pulling out the big gun scopes.

You will be able to do some of the basic ABS checks. i.e the amplitude and pattern of a sensor (including damaged tone wheels) but comparable tests require a 4 channel scope and a reasonable memory (buffer) size. A TPS for drop outs, injector voltage, parasitic draw ect.

Their choice is the Nano for a few reasons. The resolution is good 12 bit compared to the other 8 bit scope. Also their are a few programs on the web that allows you to reconfigure the Nano. And it looks cool.

So for $70 you can 't go wrong. You just have to be aware of it's limitations to basic checks.

HTH

I could'nt find any 'bit' specs on the cheaper Nano... the 201.

Then, if one has a laptop (orthe smaller knee-top ) there's always this one...

HANTEK PC USB 2CH Digital Oscilloscope 20M Hz 48M Sa/s 1M Byte/CH Portable | eBay

Yep, just want to do basic checks, whicht the Nano would do fine with. - The above is fancier, and I suppose more user-friendly with it's GUI rather than endless scrolling menus...

I'll talk myself into one of them at this rate !

I got mine today. After downloading a manual I played with it for a while looking at some pwm signals from my Llams test setup. I haven't looked at its data capture capabilities yet but its in a totally different league to the multimeter I've been using as far as voltage signals are concerned.

Originally Posted by superquag

Just a thought from the D1 thread (worrying about ABS wheel sensors) - seeing as I binned a perfectly good ( ok, maybe not exactly working.) occilloscope I thought maybe something like this could be used to 'watch' the sensor waveform(s) and compare...

- Thoughts from the more experienced please ???

ARM DSO Nano Pocket-Sized Portable Digital Oscilloscope | eBay

HANDHELD POCKET SCOPE 40MS/s w/ probe Velleman HPS140i | eBay

No doubt I could find some audio uses for it.

Ive used the Vellemen and really didn't like it, the interface sucks and takes a while to figure out how to drive it. Plus the display is difficult to read accurately. For really good scopes these are 2 excellent choices if you have the coin

1. Details

2. Pico Automotive Diagnostics Kit - the ideal automotive diagnostic tool for your workshop