Hi,
after "plunging" into the forum due to the acute syndrom of "I wanna answer this", it may be time to introduce myself and also to put a new question...
I´m Phillip, year of manufacture 1977, PhD of physics and now since decades earning my money with use-case-specific measurement systems for science and production lines. At university it started that we need to build special measurement systems for exotic kind of matter, and since you could not buy any of the instruments you need for this off the shelf we had to construct everything on our own responsibility from mechanics over electronics, digital signal processing, computer vision up to software for the user interface. As more and more fascination for this kind of development developed itself, I worked in more and more projects of that kind - it was always more rewarding for me to be productive in R&D than to fight against each other in managment
Just in case anyone is still interested: I have a question that this forum may be perfect for:
I´m searching for an USB-ADC or toy oscilloscope with the following requirements:
- Bandwidth up to 1MHz horizontally, 12 or better 16 Bit vertically, 10MSamples/s
- at least 10k Samples of internal memory, better 1M or even 1G of memory
- external trigger with low jitter
- at least 2, better 4 channels
- easy to handle digital interface, should be able to be configured and read-out by Python or Labview
- optional: SD-Card interface so that the waveform memory is automatically dumped to a SD-Card with timestamps
What is my motivation: I want a precise utility (--> requirement for 12Bit or more) to dive deeper into signals I pre-checked on the oscilloscope. E.g. a RGB-photodiode array is evaluating the light output of a PWM-controlled spotlight. I´d like to arrange the measurement setup with an ordinary DSO, but then switch to the ADC-box to run some validation runs with on-the-fly evaluation and documentation.
I sometimes read through the offerings of the toy-scopes (Hantek e.g.) but they rarely have more than 8Bit and user reviews often report instabilities or distortions.
What I really woud like is a set of 4ADCs like they are used in DVB-T-Sticks or SDR-Sticks (RTL2832 2.4MHz Bandwidth, 8-Bit resolution) together with a FPGA that does the trigger algorithms and some digital filtering.
Is there potentially some ADC-evalboard that can be used for these tasks? I´m not afraid of low-level-access to the chips, indeed I´d prefer low-level-access to the ADC over any intransparent signal conditioning by the manufacturer. Anyhow I have no experience in FPGA design, so it´d be great if an off-the-shelf module would already have a USB- and maybe SD-Card interface embedded.
Thanks a lot for all constructive comments or ideas!