I've always said that anyone working on an electronic system really needs an oscilloscope. Without it, you are effectively blind and just guessing at what the s

I've always said that anyone working on an electronic system really needs an oscilloscope. Without it, you are effectively blind and just guessing at what the signals on a PC board or on a wire look like. When I first started (a long time ago), those images were mostly transient. Really? All the scopes I've ever used have had capture modes (although I have never used truly antique scopes). While I forget what the function is called, the scope would trigger on an edge, capture the waveform and freeze it on the screen. Now, this only ever fits a handful of bits (maybe 3-5 ASCII letters) onscreen, but it was really helpful for me. If you wanted to capture data in the middle of a long stream, you could use a second probe for the trigger, and in your code fire a single edge on a secondary pin right as you send the data you want to capture... lot of cool things you could do. Even the old analog scopes are amazingly powerful. I highly encourage anyone doing much scoping to do their best to master it. But anyway, back to the subject at hand, I just thought I ought to point out to those who are getting into this sort of thing that Logic Analyzers exist for exactly this purpose.