Hi everyone.

I've tried looking for a half decent digital oscillscope, primarily because I need the storage/capture function they provide.

However, on my very tight budget, I cannot seem to find one cheap enough, nor can I even find one which is broken and I could fix up (someone was wanting £150 for a broken scope!).

I was thinking if it would be possible to create a circuit which would 'store' a waveform, which I could hook up to my scope.

By store, I mean when I press a button (for example), the circuit would keep feeding the same waveform to my oscilloscope so I could investigate further.

I have tried Googling for ideas, but I cannot seem to find anything, which makes me believe that it is very hard to do. Perhaps you guys could help?

Many thanks,

Sparky

 

Yes it's hard to do. What you want is an analog storage device, such as a bucket-brigade or CCD to store the waveform. But those get very difficult to build for frequencies above a few MHz.

You best bet is to just keep looking for a digital scope. What is your budget?

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I did think it would be hard to do... I guess that's why they are so expensive.

My budget is about £100, it's not a lot I know, but I would've thought I could buy something for that.

 

Have you thought about something like this linked to your PC? They can be had for under £100 on ebay.

 

I have, yeah - even borrowed one to play around with!

However, I found it quite slow to respond. I know that unlike an analogue oscilloscope, pretty much all lower end digital scopes will have some delay, but I was testing the picoscope, and it just seemed to take forever for the waveform to change on my screen. Probably because my laptop's quite slow!

I might then have to buy a quicker laptop, but then that's more expensive!

I also found it to produce rather untidy waves - a nice smooth sine on my analogue would be jumping around, and a square wave would look alot more rounded.