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Test device MAXIM MAX11300 Arduino Shield

A project log for Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope Review

Element 14 is running roadtests and I was lucky to be able to test and review a Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope.

magicwolfiMagicWolfi 03/27/2016 at 20:440 Comments

My device to test all the scope functions is an Arduino shield with a MAXIM MAX11300 20-port mixed signal IC, which offers DAC, ADC, analog switches and GPIO port functionality and can be programmed through SPI interface (the board is hosted on Hackaday.io as well MAXIM MAX11300 board)

This makes it easy to program simple and complex waveforms to showcase the capabilities. Here a simple DAC output, captured on a single analog channel.

TEK00008.PNG

Very impressive on this scope is the record length of the capture buffer. With 1M (or 1.25M at 1msec time base or slower) points the zoom function with the Wave Inspector PAN & ZOOM wheel (the center knob to zoom and the ring to pan) comes in very handy and reveals the depth of capture in great detail.

As example a step function from 2.5V to 5V with 40msec/div resolution looks like a real digital step. A rise time measurement has been added, but shows an uncertain value of 104.1us(?).

pos edge

Zooming in just 6 steps to a factor of 200x shows the first sign of a slope and a rise time measurement of 2.022usec. It is possible to scale the same capture to 4usec/dev and be able to determine the rise time accurately to 1.780usec.

pos edge zoom in

The maximum zoom factor is 10k times the original scale, limited off course by the sampling depth of 1.25MS and the 1GS/s sample rate of the scope.

The same voltage step captured with an original scale set to 4usec/dev, shows how accurate the trace of the zoomed in signal was and measures the rise time to 1.766usec. Pretty close to the measurement of the zoomed signal.

pos edge close zoom

Wearing my usability hat again, the pan wheel works opposite to my brain, when turning the wheel clockwise I was expecting the plot to move to the right and vice versa. What happens is, the plot is moving to the left, which feels wrong to me. To understand the direction one has to look at the zoom window showed in the top part of the screen that contains the whole plot and the zoom section markers move to the direction the wheel is turned. But overall, this is a great implementation of the zoom feature.

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