Learning my new Siglent 1104X-E

[Old Printer]

I have this as my first real scope, have a couple old TEKs and an Analog Discovery 2, but am far from an accomplished user. I have a week of down time (vacation) coming up and thought this would be a good time to get familiar with my new toy/tool. Electronics is a hobby and I have only been at it for a couple years. Two things upfront..I will be away from home, and at a place with marginal internet. I can bring my AD for it's function generator/digital capabilities, and I have a pretty good stock of components, breadboards etc, but can only drag so much stuff with me. I have printed the full scope manual, courtesy of a nice color laser printer at work.
So all that said, if anyone has some suggestions of build-able circuits, books, online tutorials or youtubes etc I would be grateful. I have watched a million YTs but am having trouble putting together a meaningful collection that would help me work my way through the manual and get a handle on this thing. Do you think buying the lab manual for The Art of Electronics would make sense? I have the book in PDF format, but not the lab manual. I only have a couple days to pull this together. Thanks

[rstofer]

I would bring along an Arduino and a potentiometer (plus a lapop, of course).  I would do the "knob" example (comes with IDE) to play with PWM.  I would also cobble together some kind of SPI master so I could play with decoding.  SPI doesn't require an acknowledge like I2C so there is no problem with not having a slave (except the return data is always 0xff).  I would also do one of the serial examples (RS232 kind of serial) and practice decoding.

The AD2 will do a fine job of creating arbitrary waveforms to look at.  I would bring along a resistor and capacitor (1 ufd, 1k, time constant Tau = 1 ms) and play with capacitor charging and discharging using the AD2 as a source of 80 Hz squarewave (I would be shooting for 6 Tau charge and 6 tau discharge -> 12 Tau total period so 1/(12 Tau) = 83 Hz (give or take).  You can change Tau if you wish by changing the capacitor.  0.1 ufd would be another choice.  I wouldn't reduce the resistor much farther because of the load on the AD2.  You can reduce the capacitor to something like 0.1 ufd if you wish.  I would set the output voltage as 0V referenced (0V..1V) rather than symmetric (-0.5V..0.5V).  Or not...

I might bring along a 2N3904 (and datasheet) and build up a simple common emitter amplifier.  Maybe a 4.7k (10k) base resistor and a 1k collector emitter.  The AD2 can provide a few volts to the Vcc end of the collector resistor (and gnd for the emitter)  The function generator can provide a clean sine wave.  If I had enough reference material, or worked it out ahead of time, I might put a resistor in the emitter leg to control gain and bypass it with some value of capacitor.  I think w2aew did a video on this.

It would be fun to have the AD2 put out a sine wave and look at an FFT of the waveform.  Increase the frequency, adjust the display, etc.

If I had time, I might play with a low voltage rail-to-rail op amp.  I might put a 1 ufd capacitor in the feedback path and a 1 Mohm resistor in the input path to create a 1 second integrator.  I would hit it with a very slow square wave and watch the linear ramp at the output.  You could speed it up with a 10k resistor.  I don't know which op amp but I suspect it is in the Analog Parts Kit.  Probably too late to get one if you don't have it.

[rstofer]

Don't forget, the AD2 can produce arbitrary digital and analog waveforms (or both at the same time although I have never done this).  You will have the opportunity to test 4 channels.

[Old Printer]

Rstofer, Thank you for the reply and excellent advice. It sound like a well rounded group of signals that should cover a lot of bases. I have all of the components and will take minimum space. Looking forward to this, as soon as I figure a way to tell my wife I am bringing a scope on vacation

[rstofer]

MANY years ago, I took my GF camping at the Grand Canyon.  Sitting at the park bench, I doodled out a very capable rally computer for my sports car events.  I finished the design in the peace and quiet of the great outdoors.  Most productive week ever!

Same GF, different vacation, I spent my time at Pismo Beach designing a small digital computer - just the basics but a capable design.  I never did build it...  Too much wire-wrapping.

Don't forget quadrille paper and a number of pencils/pens.

[Old Printer]

MANY years ago, I took my GF camping at the Grand Canyon.  Sitting at the park bench, I doodled out a very capable rally computer for my sports car events.  I finished the design in the peace and quiet of the great outdoors.  Most productive week ever!

Same GF, different vacation, I spent my time at Pismo Beach designing a small digital computer - just the basics but a capable design.  I never did build it...  Too much wire-wrapping.

Don't forget quadrille paper and a number of pencils/pens.

Don't forget quadrille paper and a number of pencils/pens.
Already packed, pencil fan myself

We will be staying with friends in a 150 year old farm house on a woodlot in upstate New York, hence the limited internet. The perfect place to do this on basically a sit around and BS week.

[rstofer]

While you're at it, consider using a 0.1 ufd capacitor and a 1k resistor as a low pass filter.  Then use the signal generator to drive into the resistor and measure the output with channel 1 of the AD2.  Try the Network Analyzer tool to get the Bode' Plot of amplitude versus frequency.  The -3dB point should be around 1591 Hz so sweeping to 10 kHz may be sufficient.  The AD2 can go much higher.

Here is a pretty great low pass filter calculator:
http://sim.okawa-denshi.jp/en/CRtool.php

Your Bode' Plot should look a lot like the calculator's.

There's a lot of education in simple circuits and a bunch of time.

[Old Printer]

I have yet to get to the point where I understand the use or value of a Bode Plot. It seems to be a valuable piece if information, I just don't know for what yet

[tautech]

I know it's a hunk of additional cash but I've found Siglent's STB3 very useful to get to grips with the functionality of the modern DSO.
It provides a heap of pre-programmed signals and some user definable selections as well. Some of the waveforms can be difficult to trigger or display correctly and as such provides some education of some advanced scope use.

Here's where you can get it and some pics of both sides:
https://store.siglentamerica.com/product/stb-3-oscilloscope-demo-training-board/

Capabilities and usage instruction:
https://siglentna-qwavztc8hvq2w.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2018/07/STB3_User-Manual_UM60109_E01B.pdf

I have yet to get to the point where I understand the use or value of a Bode Plot. It seems to be a valuable piece if information, I just don't know for what yet

Bode plot consists of a couple of principles and in some ways it's better thought of as SweptFRA or FRA (Frequency Response Analysis) that makes more sense of how it works and why you'd use it.

rf-loop's investigations in this thread are 'next level stuff' where the wise old EE explores what its capable of:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds1x04x-e-bodeplot-ii-(sfra)-features-and-testing-(coming)/

Here where I had a first look at it with much older firmware I found a good online tutorial and just followed that
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds1204x-e-released-for-domestic-markets-in-china/msg1435854/#msg1435854
A few days later I added an additional channel to demonstrate looking at just one part of a pass fiter in relation to the complete bandpass.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds1204x-e-released-for-domestic-markets-in-china/msg1436912/#msg1436912

Then recently with the new firmware had another go here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds1204x-e-released-for-domestic-markets-in-china/msg2453097/#msg2453097

You've had scope experience and that's good however don't get too far ahead of yourself before mastering the basics again but this time with a DSO. Then you can progress into more advanced use once you've become more familiar with the features these great little DSO's offer.

[rstofer]

I have yet to get to the point where I understand the use or value of a Bode Plot. It seems to be a valuable piece if information, I just don't know for what yet

You may want to get rid of higher frequency trash.  In audio, it will pass the base and attenuate the treble.  If that is a goal

[Old Printer]

I have yet to get to the point where I understand the use or value of a Bode Plot. It seems to be a valuable piece if information, I just don't know for what yet

You may want to get rid of higher frequency trash.  In audio, it will pass the base and attenuate the treble.  If that is a goal

My audio so far is limited to working on my old Fender tube amps. Have chased down a few bad bypass caps but not had a scope in there yet, though I have watched a couple guys on YT feed a signal and trace it through on an old analog scope. No Bode plots in sight

[rstofer]

In college, we sketched the Bode' Plot by hand knowing the corner frequency.  When it came to tuned circuits, including a transistor and such, things became more difficult.  I was lucky to have access to an IBM 1130 and the IBM Electronic Circuit Analysis Program (ECAP, an early Spice).  Few people did back in the early '70s.

Since I never worked in electronics and certainly not in analog, I haven't had much use for Bode' Plots over the years.  Fourier Analysis?  Just once!  When I did play with electronics, it was always digital.

Still, I like to do some of the more simple experiments just to get some use out of my AD2.  It seems like I ought to know this stuff...

[Old Printer]

Thanks for all your input rstofer. Almost home and I did have a good amount of time to put in on the scope.
Unfortunately I had to borrow a laptop, an 2010 Mac running Snow Leopard, and Waveforms would not run on it. I created some SPI files on the Arduino, but could not get anything decoded. Once home I will get a signal going on the AD2 and I already know how to decode with Waveforms. At this point I have two pages of notes and could not ask an intelligent question about what I was doing wrong.