Time for a bit of an equipment upgrade in my little home repair shop, and could use a suggestion.
I do pinball board repairs as a small side job, and lately have gotten a few tricky boards in for repair. Not complicated stuff at all, but I'm getting enough volume lately that I need to streamline my diagnostics. A logic probe and test LED's are slow to work with, and hauling out my 'scope is equally cumbersome. I'd really like to have a logic analyzer to speed things up when I get a tough one, but at the same time my budget is pretty limited.
The stuff I do is almost exclusivly running Motorola 68XX series processors, which are only a paltry 1mhz.
I was hoping somebody could point me at a unit that can fit my needs, and I've nailed down my requirements pretty solidly.
16 input channels.
Enough speed that I can use all 16 at once, to catch the full address bus.
Pattern generator, so I can test the TTL logic chips.
Compatible with 5v TTL logic.
The big limitation seems to be that pattern generator. Not many appear to have one, but it would be a huge help for me to have it.
I've been eyeballing the PoScope and the Hobbylab units, which appear to be the same thing, but I just can't tell from the specs on them what the sample rate is when sampling all 16 channels. Apparently you can now run multiple units simultaneously as well, which would be fantastic too.
I flat out don't care one way or another about any oscilliscope features, and do zero work with serial data. It's all 8-bit parallel.
I do pinball board repairs as a small side job, and lately have gotten a few tricky boards in for repair. Not complicated stuff at all, but I'm getting enough volume lately that I need to streamline my diagnostics. A logic probe and test LED's are slow to work with, and hauling out my 'scope is equally cumbersome. I'd really like to have a logic analyzer to speed things up when I get a tough one, but at the same time my budget is pretty limited.
The stuff I do is almost exclusivly running Motorola 68XX series processors, which are only a paltry 1mhz.
I was hoping somebody could point me at a unit that can fit my needs, and I've nailed down my requirements pretty solidly.
16 input channels.
Enough speed that I can use all 16 at once, to catch the full address bus.
Pattern generator, so I can test the TTL logic chips.
Compatible with 5v TTL logic.
The big limitation seems to be that pattern generator. Not many appear to have one, but it would be a huge help for me to have it.
I've been eyeballing the PoScope and the Hobbylab units, which appear to be the same thing, but I just can't tell from the specs on them what the sample rate is when sampling all 16 channels. Apparently you can now run multiple units simultaneously as well, which would be fantastic too.
I flat out don't care one way or another about any oscilliscope features, and do zero work with serial data. It's all 8-bit parallel.