3 ms·

This is going to date me, but... as a physics grad student, my teaching assistant service for one year was the freshman physics lab. One of the lab sessions was

This is going to date me, but... as a physics grad student, my teaching assistant service for one year was the freshman physics lab. One of the lab sessions was the "oscilloscope lab," where we rolled out carts full of (cheap) analog oscilloscopes and function generators. The equipment was old, so the switches and controls were flaky. There really was no clear explanation of what "triggering" was doing, therefore, what the display really meant. Any explanation would work for only the 1/2 of the class for whom the scopes were actually working. The professor, a theoretical physicist, was lost. I was already an electronics buff, and knew my way around a scope, but could think my way past its foibles. The lab was a failure. I've talked to people who still remember the "oscilloscope lab" from college. What I thought, and still think, is we were teaching the wrong thing, which was how to make sense of a futzy machine with a bad UI. Instead, wouldn't it be nice if there were a machine that would let you... 1) Measure voltage as a function of time. 2) Display it. 3) Analyze it (store it, etc.). For most simple waveforms, you don't need triggering if you can have data storage and display instead. Today's scopes are vastly less flaky, and have storage, but still have the same unintelligible controls, made worse by cramming more functions into fewer knobs and buttons. I'm talking about you, Rigol, though I've bought two Rigol scopes. Something like this Korg scope might be a very nice thing if it solves, not the electronic or measurement problem, but the UI problem for what it's intended to do. Display audio waveforms and basic analysis in a straightforward way. Myself, I've gone a different way, which is a homemade measurement board based on a microcontroller, and a Jupyter notebook.

ChuckMcM 4y ago
THIS. It might surprise readers but you can hire someone with a BSEE who is fresh out of college and really doesn't "get" any of this. And a good tool and good curriculum material can go a long way toward turning them into functional engineers. This is especially helpful for the ones who cheated their way through school and are now SHOCKED that they are expected to both know and even understand this stuff to do their job. A good source for this has been the Digilent tools, in particular the Analog Discovery 2[1] in combination with a bread board and some basic components[2]. It is inexpensive enough that you can just buy one for a new college grad and give it to them on their first day. Then expect them to have it available when they are trying to learn the stuff you need them to know. Knowing that everyone has this basic set of gear (or kit as our UK folks like to call it) Means that even on Zoom to a remote engineer you can say "Okay hook up the following bits to your machine and share your Waveforms screen, we'll go over what is going on and why it is important ..." The best part is that if you later need to remote into a lab bench setup you have the bases skills that are essential to letting you look at what is going on with the thing that isn't working on the bench. [1] https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-discovery-2/start https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d... [2] They used to have a great pre-packaged bundle of components for analog work (sponsored by Analog Devices :-)) which was another $100 and had pretty much all you needed for learning the kinds of things they needed to know to be effective.
nolroz 4y ago
Do you have any information on the board and setup you use? Seems interesting.
- analog31 4y ago
  Nothing published online. I'll have to think about what I can share, that's actually interesting, humanly build-able, and useful.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Triggering was originally designed for repeating waveforms, well before storage scopes were a thing. Triggering basically means a positive or negative transition over/under a certain level. You can set the level manually, and this gives you a basic left/right (phase) shift on the display. It's really not a bad UI if you understand what it's trying to do. Often you want to see what happens after some reference point or - literally - some triggering event like a pulse. Constant sampling doesn't solve the problem. You still need to work out where the point of interest is. That's fairly simple for a static repeating waveform, but not at all a trivial problem for any waveform that changes over time - as many audio waveforms do.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

THIS. It might surprise readers but you can hire someone with a BSEE who is fresh out of college and really doesn't "get" any of this. And a good tool and good curriculum material can go a long way toward turning them into functional engineers. This is especially helpful for the ones who cheated their way through school and are now SHOCKED that they are expected to both know and even understand this stuff to do their job. A good source for this has been the Digilent tools, in particular the Analog Discovery 2[1] in combination with a bread board and some basic components[2]. It is inexpensive enough that you can just buy one for a new college grad and give it to them on their first day. Then expect them to have it available when they are trying to learn the stuff you need them to know. Knowing that everyone has this basic set of gear (or kit as our UK folks like to call it) Means that even on Zoom to a remote engineer you can say "Okay hook up the following bits to your machine and share your Waveforms screen, we'll go over what is going on and why it is important ..." The best part is that if you later need to remote into a lab bench setup you have the bases skills that are essential to letting you look at what is going on with the thing that isn't working on the bench. [1] https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-discovery-2/start https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d... [2] They used to have a great pre-packaged bundle of components for analog work (sponsored by Analog Devices :-)) which was another $100 and had pretty much all you needed for learning the kinds of things they needed to know to be effective.

nolroz 4y ago

Do you have any information on the board and setup you use? Seems interesting.

analog31 4y ago
Nothing published online. I'll have to think about what I can share, that's actually interesting, humanly build-able, and useful.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Triggering was originally designed for repeating waveforms, well before storage scopes were a thing. Triggering basically means a positive or negative transition over/under a certain level. You can set the level manually, and this gives you a basic left/right (phase) shift on the display. It's really not a bad UI if you understand what it's trying to do. Often you want to see what happens after some reference point or - literally - some triggering event like a pulse. Constant sampling doesn't solve the problem. You still need to work out where the point of interest is. That's fairly simple for a static repeating waveform, but not at all a trivial problem for any waveform that changes over time - as many audio waveforms do.