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 Forum index » DIY Hardware and Software
DIY Equipment for home electronics labs
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jksuperstar



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 10:54 am    Post subject: DIY Equipment for home electronics labs
Subject description: Dynon Instruments ELAB-080
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A friend and I purchased a Dynon Instruments http://www.dynoninstruments.com/ ELAB-080 a few months ago, and have increasingly become dependent on it for development and testing. This one little box connects via USB to a PC, where it contains software to interface to the onboard:
2 channel Oscope (80Ms/s @ 20MHz!)
16 channel Logic Analyzer
5 channel Digital waveform generator
1 channel Arbitrary Waveform Generator
Dual Power Supply (+/- 10V)
External trigger, clocks...
All probes for oscope & logic analyzer!

PROS: For less than $500US it was delivered to our door in less than a week, and this has about the most bang for the buck over any other home-lab equipment we could find. We've used all the features, and found a complete portable lab with everything working, and programmable, so we can different setups for various projects. The hardware is also more than accurate enough for home-lab use, and the syncronous sample of both analog and digital waves makes developing DSPs and mixed-cahnnel circuits easy. It's fantastic to work on a project, while not fighting the tools!

CONS: It's software isn't the most stable thing we've ever used (occasional crashes), and it isn't the most elegant, but the company provides a free .DLL and Labview interface, so you can always create your own interface if needed. The onboard memory depth isn't that deep either (~32K samples per channel), but maybe I'm just used to my Lecroy at work with 2G samples depth, which is also 100x the price! It'd be nice for slower sampling frequencies to extend into the PC's memory space, but that's currently un-available. However, we haven't run into any problems with the limited memory, so try not to take this as a negative comment. Only be aware of it.

Anyway, I've found it extremely useful, and figure many of you would also.
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mosc
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 12:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

This looks very cool.

BTW, I made a few edits to enhance your post. Smile

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v-un-v
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

It's still a lot cheaper to buy a secondhand oscilloscope on ebay though. 500 big ones is a lot of money- and you need a PC too Evil or Very Mad

nice that it comes with psu and function gen though Smile

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zipzap



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Quote:
It's still a lot cheaper to buy a secondhand oscilloscope on ebay though. 500 big ones is a lot of money- and you need a PC too

Think so too. Just got mine for 30 Bucks. Nothing fancy but better than this http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/7156/articl3.htm (although i like it)
But i guess it all depends on what you want to do. In my case i just want to look at my sounds and feel like a scientist with this old pice of vintage looking equipment. Also for debuging of a circuit its nice to see where the signal disappears. No need to be that accurate i guess (if it sounds right it is right...)
But in other cases higher quality lab equipment must be essential and has its price.
BtW I haven´t got any probes. just got the osc. Anyone made those in the diy manner?

ps just found the spellcheck button - This ist wunderful!
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v-un-v
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

zipzap wrote:
i just want to look at my sounds and feel like a scientist with this old pice of vintage looking equipment.


Right on! It's that 'boffin in the garden shed' look- you just don't get that with some black plastic Dell tower PC Wink

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jksuperstar



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 9:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I just think DIY is crossing more into the digital and DSP domain. Which requires a different set of tools. Of course, you *could* use a parallel port DIY logic analyzer/waveform gen. But trying to do logic that goes beyond step sequencing and into DSP means speeeds a lot faster than 4MHz.
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