 Every single lady is your user powers of engineering and more to search on digikey.com Take a digikey for the parts that you're looking for. This is a great search lady. What are you looking for this week? A common request. We have people who have emailed us multiple times and they said, I want to pick up a low cost oscilloscope. My first oscilloscope. And they want some suggestions and I was like, oh, I don't really have a good suggestion. I haven't looked at what's available in the market. I thought I would use that for the great search to check out digikey, see if there's a couple of good options available and also talk about some of the tradeoffs. Basically, if you have infinite money, you can get the best scope in the world. But if you don't have infinite money, let's say your budget is like $500, which I think is pretty fair for a good desktop scope. You do have to trade off what you're willing to spend money on and what you're willing to let go of in order to get other specs that are better because it's all going to be, all the specs are going to be, they're going to affect the price. The more bandwidth, the more expensive, the more channels, the more expensive, the bigger screen, the more expensive. So what's important to you? So it's a tradeoff. Again, if you have $5,000, you probably don't have to trade off any of these things. You get exactly what you want. But for $500, let's see what's available. So let me go to, yeah, I was going to do a great search about IMUs, but there are no IMUs, so it was like, it was a total downer. Maybe, maybe when there's more available. Okay, so we're at DigiKeys, it's got a computer. And we're going to type in a oscilloscope, which is tough to spell, but they do have them. I think I got my first oscilloscope from DigiKeys as well. So there's a couple scopes. You know, there's the standard type scope and there's also, you know, these smartphone tablet scopes. Now, I'm biased. You will get a higher spectoscope if you don't have a screen, but I really, really, really like the benchtop ones with the screen. I don't, there's some people who can do the USB ones. I just don't like them. It's personal. I just don't like them. Other people can do a video where they say how much they love them. I really like to have the knob. I like to be able to see the waveform and I'm twisting the knob at the same time. I don't necessarily like computer style. So that said, let's just do basic. First off, I want benchtype. I want it to be active. And I'm only going to look at ones that are in stock right now because I'm not going to suggest a scope that you can't get. So again, there's going to be a lot of trade-offs. So the things that I find most important in an oscilloscope is number one, the number of channels, because there's no upgrading. You know, it's like once you get the channels, that's fixed. You pay more for more channels. There's basically either two channel or four channel. Those are your options. Now, I have four channel scope and I've always kind of purchased four channel scopes, but I'll say, you know, 99% of the time, I don't use four channels. I use two channels. There's a trigger and there's a response, especially if you're doing analog, but even with digital, because instead you'd get a logic analyzer that you would use for your digital signals. And part of the reason for that, of course, is digital signals are usually much, much faster than analog signals, like ironically. It's not unusual to have a microcontroller that is running the SPI line at 60 megahertz, 80 megahertz. ESP32 can do that. The Raspberry Pi can do that. Sometimes you're looking at a crystal, but usually crystals aren't that fast. Usually crystals are like, if you're looking at oscillation on your analog scope, it's going to be 12 or 24 megahertz. So, you know, if you have a logic analyzer, you can get away with a two channel scope. If you don't, there have been times where I'm like, I want to look at the chip select line, the data clock line, and, you know, whatever, some other line. It's possible. Or I want to look at the power supply voltage while I'm also looking at, you know, I squared C. So, it is possible that you'll need four. I'm going to assume, however, that you're going to want two. But you definitely want not one. One channel is kind of useless, in my opinion. I think you really need two. So, let's look at the two channel scopes. Next step that I'm actually going to pay for is bandwidth. Bandwidth is kind of sort of the fastest signal you can look at. It's a little bit more complicated than that, because if you're looking at a square wave, you know, the square wave, you're like, oh, it's a 50 megahertz square wave. But the square wave has higher frequency components that will not come through. And so, you'll kind of get a sinusoid instead. You know, again, if you have a logic analyzer, you could probably get away with a slower scope. However, I really think that 100 megahertz is kind of the minimum. I did look at this, and there were scopes that I had a 60 megahertz bandwidth. I think if you want to last a couple of years, get 100. You know, it's not just how fast is the frequency of the thing. It's how good is it going to be at reproducing rise times. And if you're doing, you know, if you're looking at some digital signals, you might need to look at, you know, skew or slew rate. It's not a bad idea. So, you know, I definitely, 20 is too small. 20 is like a handheld thing. I'd say, you know, 70 plus is good. For beginner scope, you're probably going to get about, like, 100-ish. You know, my desktop scope here is, it's 5 gigahertz, 5 giga samples per second, 1 gigahertz bandwidth. But it's also a very fancy scope. So, you know, what you're going to do. But it wasn't my beginner scope. My beginner scope was 100 megahertz bandwidth. It was a TDS, Tektronix TDS 2014, I think, which was 100 megahertz four-channel color scope. The good news is that pretty much every scope is LCD. So that's nice. They're going to be lightweight. You're going to be able to carry it, put it on your desk. You can't search by price, but you can sort by price. Since we have a budget of about $500, I did that. And there are a couple good options. So there's quite a few under, you know, right under $500 range. You know, here's another thing, you know, in addition to bandwidth, memory size. So, if you're zooming into or you want to scan through a waveform, memory size is going to be something that comes up. It seemed to me while looking at these options that there's kind of like either 20 kilopoints or like a mega point and higher. I actually kind of feel like you could save a lot of money on lower kilopoint memory, but I actually have been really annoyed. I remember once I used a scope with very low kilopoint memory and it was really annoying because I couldn't trigger something and look later at the signal. It was like you couldn't zoom in. There's something nice about you trigger on a signal and you zoom in and you're like, ooh, I can like keep zooming in and I can get the detail, even if you looked at the longer signal first. You trigger on the longer signal and you zoomed in. So even though there's these cheapy, you know, like $300 scopes, I actually, I'm going to say like, get at least a mega point. I don't care about the interface as much. I've never used Ethernet or USB or Wi-Fi. At the most, I've used like grab a screenshot, but everything has a screenshot capability these days. That's not a big deal. And of course phones are really good and with an LCD, you can just take a photo with your phone. You know, it's, I know it's a little tacky, but there's no real reason. So there were a couple options here and I didn't look at, you know, why the, you know, the why and which, they're all kind of the same family, these Ohan SDS7 series. It looked like what you're paying for basically is bandwidth at this point because, you know, we selected a range. So 170, 70 and 100, 200. You know, if you're, if you're, if you're really up to about 500 bucks, you know, this 200 megahertz, 10 mega point one is, is pretty good. So like the 7202, you know, has a big screen. It's only two channel, but it is under, you know, you'll get it for 500 bucks and it's got a giga sample per second and 200 megahertz. That'll last you quite a bit. You know, you get this in college or something and you'll be using it, you know, easily for five, six years. And I've seen people use these scopes. You're the only other thing that you don't really get to know from specs just purchasing and why it's good if you can find someone with the same family of scope or the same model is how good it is at triggering. I've always liked the tech scope triggering. I found it's really solid. It's very reliable. I remember a long time ago. Wiggle scopes did not have very good triggering, but I think that's probably improved. That was like 10 years ago. I think probably it's a lot better. But if you do have somebody with these scopes, you'll put on a signal where you want to trigger on something and look at, is it stable or is it kind of like freaky? Can you do a single shot? And like, it'll actually get the single shot. But as for actual capabilities, pretty much every scope has the same capabilities these days. You could always, you know, have triggers and you can have, you know, measurements on screen and you can do math and you can do FFT. That's super, super standard. So this would be, I think, a good two-channel scope for beginner under 500 bucks. And then they also have a four-channel one. It's like 650. I think if you can spare the extra 200, go for the four-channel. It'll definitely make you very happy, but I think this two-channel scope is a good beginner scope that will also take you pretty far. So, you know, assuming you are, you continue to be interested in electronics, you'll be able to use this for almost everything. All right, that's a great church.