Getting back into things

[mickelsen]

I worked for my whole career as a programmer with a lot of digital design and debugging thrown in. I even designed a couple of ASIC's. I retired a few years ago, but I would like to get back into it on a hobby level. The trouble is I just don't have those neat development and debugging tools available at home that I did at work, and I don't have a lot of money to buy any, either. What I do have is a very nice laptop, with a 1.8Ghz processor, 512Mbytes of memory, a 60Gbyte disk, several USB 2.0 ports, a 1394 Firewire port, and a WiFi internet connection. I am thinking that this can serve as the basis for several instruments and development tools. I know I can get an MPLab ICD for PIC microcontroller development. Does anyone know of an inexpensive oscilloscope module that is designed to use a PC for its data crunching and display? Or perhaps some medium speed data digitizing modules with software that can act as a digital oscilloscope and/or several other things besides? How about a multichannel digital signal capture with some sort of breakpoint capability (even if its just in software) that could act as a logic analyzer? Well, you can see what I'm driving at. Am I just whistling in the wind or is any of this possible. Let me know, people. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

[philba]

A lot depends on what you want to do. Speed == Cost in oscopes and logic analyzers. <p>I do mostly uC stuff and get by just fine with $100 used HP 2225 (60 mhz, dual trace) scope and no logic analyzer (though I do want one). I am still looking at logic analyzer modules but nothing under $500 looks that good to me. I have considered a used logic analyzer from ebay. There appear to be some good deals in the older hp 16xx line. I don't think I'd need anything over 100 mhz timing analysis.<p>Phil<p>[ May 22, 2005: Message edited by: philba ]</p>

[ezpcb]

Searching for second-hand is a excellent way to save money. I can use high-end equipments which cost thousands of hundred $ in company, but I also have many second-hand equipments at home. My best record is get a 90% new 20MHz dual channel oscilloscope at only $2, it works very nice!<p>There're tons of second hand equipments in our market, as cheap as god's gift.<p>mike

[ezpcb]

Hi philba,<p>I have 2 equipments for my mcu stuff, the first intergrated an 8051 & PIC emulator, a 20M/40ch/32k logical analysizer, wave generator and logical pen together. Almost everything could been done with this cool device. The only thing I dislike is I have to buy different adaptors for different MCU. The second is a PC-based 100M/24ch/32k logical analysizer.<p>I'm not sure about the price now, but I remember it should be around $500 for the first and $300 for the second.<p>But I don't like PC-based equipments. I'm still searching for some stand-along oscilloscope and logical analysizer.<p>mike

[mickelsen]

Good Stuff! Please keep those cards and letters coming (as they used to say before the internet).
Mark