cheap "second" scope

[datacanMat]

I am a hardware guy who is looking for a cheap tool I can give the firmware desk when they need to see if their serial port is turning on. It is frustrating to have to pause what I am doing and move the scope to their desk just to probe some digital lines for 5 minutes. I am hoping there is a cost effective tool that they can keep to look at the digital lines to see if the lines are switching properly or if there is line contention or other common embedded digital issues. We have a couple of decent scopes around for serious analog investigation, but that is overkill in these cases. A cheap logic analyzer will not quite do it as it won't necessarily see line contentions. My first thought is a USB scope. Everyone says they aren't worth the money, but in this case where a lot of the analog issues are not a concern (noise, input range...) I am hoping there might be a niche. The only real important feature is the speed to pick up a 12 MHz SPI signal.

I have been searching around this morning and the best candidate I can find is https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9263] [url]https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9263 [/url] which is more features then I need but I haven't been able to find anything cheaper that does anything useful.

Can anybody suggest anything.

[rdl]

I bought a Digilent Analog Discovery Kit from Newark a couple of weeks ago. They have it on special for $99, not sure how much longer that will last. Regular price is $250 (USD). If you're in the U.S. you might check it out. At $99 it's a good deal, at $250 not so good.

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,842,1018&Prod=ANALOG-DISCOVERY

http://www.newark.com/digilent/410-244e/design-kit-analogue-discovery/dp/62W3442?Ntt=62W3442&COM=celebrating-engineers


Your link is kind of messed up btw