Oscilloscope

Whilst at school, I was always fascinated with the USB oscilloscopes we had called PicoScopes. Along with a friend, we decided to try and make our own!

This was our first major electronics project that was started in 2010 and ran for almost 2 years. It was the first time I sent PCBs out to fab in China and hand assembled everything. It consisted of a main carrier board with a Spartan 3 FPGA, external SDRAM for buffering, 100MSPS ADC and a high speed USB board connected on top using the FX2 controller from Cypress. Detachable front-ends were also constructed which provided both single ended and fully differential inputs with AC/DC coupling, gain selection and buffering to be acceptable for the ADC input range.

The design suffered from some noise problems and we didn’t ever finish pulling real-time waveforms over USB, however we learnt a huge amount from this.