DS212 Oscilloscope Review: Open Source and Great for Hacking

We’ve seen plenty of oscilloscopes that look like repurposed cell phones. Usually, though, they only have one channel. The DS212, has two channels and a signal generator! [Marco] gives his review and a quick tear down in the video below.

The scope isn’t going to replace a big bench instrument, but for a portable scope with a rechargeable battery, it isn’t bad. The 1 MHz analog bandwidth combines with a 10 megasample per second front end and 8K of sample memory. The signal generator can produce basic waveforms up to 1 MHz. We were somewhat surprised the unit didn’t sport a touch screen, which is why you can see [Marco’s] fingers in the screenshot above. He seems to like the dual rotary encoder system the devices uses for navigation.

Where this really stands out is that it is open source for the the firmware running on the STM32 processor inside. We so rarely see this for commercially available bench tools and it makes this a fine hacking platform. It’s easy to imagine adding features like digital signals out and decoding digital data. It would be interesting to marry it with a WiFi chip and use it as a front end for another device over WiFi. Lots of possibilities. [Marco] shows that even though he’s not familiar with the STM32, he was able to add a custom waveform output to the device easily. This has the potential to be a custom troubleshooting platform for your builds. Lining up all of the sensing and signal generation settings for each specific type of test means you don’t need a guru to walk through the common failure modes of a product.

There are many small inexpensive scopes out there that might not match a big bench instrument but can still be plenty useful. [Jenny List] just reviewed one that comes in at around $21. And last year, we saw a sub-$100 scope that would net you just one channel scope. That’s progress!

Filed under: ARM, tool hacks