Newbee need help to find a oscilloscope

[Irukandji]

Hi Community.
I want to buy my first oscilloscope for my own car. At my school we work with Bosch FSA oscilloscope but it is to expensive for me. I want to test sensors and actuators with a oscilloscope on a car. I only know, that i need 2 channel or more. I looked on E-ay and found a Hantek DSO5102P for 222€. Do you think it is enough for me? I really dont know which i need.
If you have a other option for me pls tell me them.

[Fungus]

Hi Community.
I want to buy my first oscilloscope for my own car. At my school we work with Bosch FSA oscilloscope but it is to expensive for me. I want to test sensors and actuators with a oscilloscope on a car. I only know, that i need 2 channel or more. I looked on E-ay and found a Hantek DSO5102P for 222€. Do you think it is enough for me? I really dont know which i need.
If you have a other option for me pls tell me them.

You don't need 100MHz bandwidth.

Will you be using a laptop? A lot of people use picoscopes for working on cars. They're USB oscilloscopes that connect to a laptop or PC (a bit like the Bosch).

https://www.picotech.com/oscilloscope/2000/picoscope-2000-overview

They even do special automotive versions (but you have to buy a special 'automotive' picoscope):

https://www.picoauto.com/downloads

There's lots of information on the web/youtube.

[JPortici]

i do this sort of stuff every day.. and i say: get a picoscope.

you WILL be using a laptop most of the time because diagnostic tools.
and you WILL need protocol decoding different than the standard uart/spi/i2c/can you can find in cheap and not so cheap scopes.

cheapest scopes beside the pico that can deal with such protocols (SENT for example) are the keysight dso3000xt series and the lecroy wavesurfer 3k. i think they are way over your budget.
higher bandwidth is preferred: if you have to probe for example a canbus and you want to see if there are slow edges or glitches you don't want them to be buried by the scope risetime.
also invest some money in probes. i can get away with it because i also use a tektronix tps which has 300V isolated inputs. the picoscope doesn't. and damaging the pico means damaging the USB port and possibly you too.
even though a 10x probe and a +/- 20V rated input *should* handle a fuel injector spike i wouldn't put my money on it and i'd go for example a 100x probe (or in my case the tek and properly rated probes)

you also will have to learn how to correctly probe (if you haven't already) and when to ignore irrelevant stuff. based on how i'm lazy when probing a car i can tell that the awful 20V spike is from a misplaced ground lead on the probe or from a serious problem.. and probing a digital line such a canbus incorrectly can unbalance the line and lead to reflections and the idiot light switching on because too many transmission errors (but the problem is you!)

[MrWolf]

I have done semi-successful attempts to use Pico through USB isolator - sort of works if one does not push the bandwidth. Isolator needs to be good and have external power. Since it was years ago I'll not recommend specific isolator. Otherwise purely experimental stuff, try at your own risk.

Found this read:
https://www.picotech.com/support/topic23641.html

[Irukandji]

I cant find this product: keysight dso3000xt.
A picoscope with 50MHz costs over 500€ ohh my gosh( i hope i found the right model). That is many for me. My Laptop can be demaged with the picoscope when i make anything wrong? It was too expensive i dont want see how it get demage.
Ist this Hantek DSO5102P totaly crap?

[JPortici]

dsox3000t, my bad. still well over 4k for the base model plus the required options i believe.

i believe that what you want to do at some point is develop and diagnose automotive hardware am i correct?
it's not that the hantek is crap, it is so limited that it is useless for your intended application. sure, almost any scope will be able to look at the analog signals inside a car but more and more sensors are digital and without a handy tool to acquire and decode the data the time you will lose will be far more expensive than the correct tool. and i'm talking about 2015-2016 consumer cars! not racecars or heavy duty veichles
at the very least you will need an obd scanner/eraser, a scope and an obd logger (sure, obd2 also uses canbus as a physical layer but decoding canbus is not the same as decoding obd2).

I must insist and still recommend a picoscope. this is their ebay shop, they usually sell discounted/refurbished/out of production modules. they are still supported 100% by the software, they will probably have very little onboard memory, slower sammplerate etc, check the model numbers.
http://www.ebay.com/usr/picotechnology

[MrWolf]

You may also consider ESD protected USB hubs:
https://www.tripplite.com/main/search/q/usb%20esd
https://www.startech.com/eu/Search?search_term=usb+hub+esd

[JPortici]

good point, if it doesn't throw the bandwidth into the sink. last time i checked (i think a year ago) it looked like there weren't usb2.0 HS isolators. they were also deemed impossible :/

[mos6502]

Why do you think you need 50 MHz for automotive? The 10 MHz of the 2204A is plenty, and that costs 133 european pesos on Amazon.