Smartscope FAQ

We consider triggering to be a typical feature that can make or break an oscilloscope, and therefore it's a shame few projects are giving clear specs here.

Regarding the scope, you can set the trigger level to any value within the full vertical scale. We also have an external trigger on our AUX connector, for which we have an opamp-based comparator, which allows you to set the trigger voltage to any level in the [0V, 3.3V] range. Furthermore the horizontal (time) position can be set freely across the entire scale of the waveform (which seems absolutely essential to us, but sometimes lacking on other platforms!)

Yes, you can trigger on rising and/or falling edges and yes, you can cross-trigger our analog signal on digital data and vice versa. Regarding digital triggers, we're planning to also implement triggering on patterns.

The software takes .csv files, which can be created in about any software including Excel. Click the upload button to upload towards the AWG core inside the SmartScope, and the wave is generated.

The SmartScope can operate in following modes: 1 analog channel + 1 of either [the second analog channel, the 8bit logical analyzer, the AWG or digital generator]. You switch between these different modes through the GUI menu. (or through the API in case you want to have full control)

Yes, you can have the analog and digital traces on the same screen. When doing a pinch, the vertical part is only affecting the active wave, while the horizontal part is affecting all waves (which is needed to keep the time relation between all active waveforms). Also, we have a grid on the screen which didn't survive the subsampling, but that grid is also adjusting very happily with pinch operations.

The FPGA firmware is flashable through the USB controller, and also the firmware of the USB controller is upgradable through USB. Both of these operations can be done without opening up the SmartScope, or without requiring any manual intervention.

Yes, you can use the SmartScope to help your development on any electronics project. Having a scope will significantly speed up your learning process in case you're new to electronics, and is an absolute must when developing larger projects as it gives you full visibility of how your electrical signals behave in time.

At the moment, we tried synching only 2 SmartScopes, resulting in 4 channels. But we've designed the signaling to allow syncing of multiple devices (also possible future family members of the SmartScope). But this will require a separate add-on device, or cut-and-paste work on the wires.

This you will not be able to generate, as it requires 2 digital outputs (OK) and 3 analog outputs (not OK), while there's only 1 analog output on the SmartScope. 8 colors *should* work: all-or-nothing for R,G and B. In best case, you could have full granularity on one color using the analog output, and then set the other 2 colors completely on or off, which would give you 256*4 colors.

This would make a great starter kit as sample source!

Regarding the analog bandwidth of 50MHz: this figure represents the 3dB point (or 50%-point) of our analog front ends. In other words: in case you first apply a 1MHz sine, and afterwards a 50MHz sine of same amplitude, then your 50MHz sine will be shown at half the amplitude of the 1MHz sine. Consider it to be the maximum frequency until which the front-end can correctly amplify the signal.

Now you're correct that when you sample a 50MHz sine using our 100MS/s SmartScope, the result will look, well, crap. If you know that the sampling speed is 100MS/s, then you should consider that the highest-freq signal you can visualize comfortable is a 20MHz sine, or a 10MHz digital signal. Now, in case the analog bandwidth would be lower (say, 10MHz), then your sine and especially digital signal would be visualized completely wrong -- see http://i.stack.imgur.com/QmI7s.png as example, where the red curve would be the result when you sample a 20MHz square wave (blue) using a 10MHz bandwidth scope, even of the sample rate is 100MS/s.

The ADC inside the SmartScope has 8 bits. This is clearly not the highest, but that is covered by the fact that we blend our 10 most recent waveforms on top of each other. This gives a very nice and smooth visual result, uncomparable to the coarse single line you see on any other USB scope. High-end scope would give this technique the shop-talk name of "Digital Phosphor".

By the time a fuse would have melted, I guess your tablet will also have melted :) While the grounds of the SmartScope and host are physically connected, the supply rail is diode protected. This means that no current can be injected into the host, keeping it safe.

The input voltage range is [-35V, 35V] using x1 probe mode, and [-350V,350V] when using the recommended x10 probe mode. Nevertheless, we designed the analog front-end to be quite shock-proof: any signal you apply on the BCN connectors goes through at least 100kOhm before it reaches any active component. And even then there is a dual diode on that node. But note that you cannot visualize any signal outside the range mentioned above.

On the AUX connector: we're having protection diodes on all IOs. Not the cheap stuff, but dual-direction TVS diodes with super-low capacitance so they don't impact your 100MS/s digital data.

On the BNC connectors (scope): whatever state the HW is in, the analog signals first pass through at least a 100k resistor before they reach any active component. This also includes whatever custom firmware is running on the FPGA.

The lightning cable we're offering is exactly the same as you can find in any Apple store. Just make sure it's an official Apple cable, otherwise it will not work. SmartScope HW is the same, so you can expect the same performance with or without Lightning cable. It will not make things run any faster.

We've been building USB cameras with special analog sensors for a couple of years, and yes there are things to take into account regarding noise separation. But there's nothing magic about them: however large the noise could be on a voltage source, you can get pretty far using a simple filter and LDOs.

Actually, don't underestimate the difficulty in making high-end audio equipment: you'll typically want an ADC with a much higher number of bits, and also you can have humming noise as you typically have a large ground loop. Both of these problems don't apply to the SmartScope.

It's correct that the SmartScope is not forwarding all data generated by the ADC towards the host. This would require a data bandwidth of 1.6Gb/s, which is even not trivial to implement using USB3.

Instead, the SmartScope is capturing waveforms of 1M consecutive samples @100MS/s for each of its channels. Once those have been stored, the waveform is sent towards the host, after which a new waveform is coming in. This means, that for each channel you can see on the host 200 waveforms per second, each existing of consecutive 100MS/s samples. This indeed means a lot of samples are being dropped between the ADC and the FPGA while the FPGA is offloading it's data towards the slower USB bus, but that's the case even on the most expensive scopes.

Now in case you're triggering on an edge which occurs, say, only 70 times/second. In such case, the FPGA will only send the waveforms including this edge towards the host, meaning that none of the 70 waveforms of interests will be dropped.

No, you cannot switch between the two modes, because we will make sure that even when using the DRAM you get the same fast visual response times as without :)

Using the RAM for both acquisition and generation is not possible, because this would require write AND read operations @100MS/s, which would require twice the RAM bandwidth. So for now we're only targeting the ram as a buffer for acquisition, although for post-release updates we could consider the RAM as buffer for generating data, in case you're not using the scope or logical analyzer options.

In our SW stack, we make a clear cut between the part really interfacing with the SmartScope's functionalities, and the visualizer on top. The core part can eg set the samplerate, start and stop the device, change trigger level, and all other functionality you expect. This core part will be provided in C (source and precompiled dlls for different platforms), allowing anyone to take full and complete control of the SmartScope's operation using a custom/community application.

On top of that, we will provide the visualizer which is feature-complete. This means that all of the functionality promised on the page is implemented and will work out of the box when you install it on your pc/tablet/smartphone.

The SmartScope runs great on the iPad1, running either iOS5 or iOS6! Of course also on the latest iOS7, but you can only upgrade the iPad1 to iOS6.

If you have a look at http://goo.gl/KbNdeP and www.riemers.net, you'll understand that I enjoy sharing what I know up to the finest details, so you definitely can expect a lot of tutorials and detailed 'recipes' to get everyone started using our platform, even when you have 0 experience in embedded programming or FPGA configuration.

We split our SW in 2 parts. The first part is the core and largest part, which is dealing with all functionality of the SmartScope. This comes in C, so it can be used as shared library for any project you would like to build. The second part is the visualization shell built around this functionality, as this is platform-specific. We're using Mono and MonoGame to achieve awesome graphical performance (MonoGame gives access to the hardware graphical accelerator) on Windows, Linux and Android. So the direct answer to your question is: check out monodevelop, which is an open-source development environment for Windows, Linux and Android. The guys at Xamarin did the amazing job of making it possible to recompile the same source also for OSX and iOS, so this allows us to build high-performant visualization code for all the platforms we were targeting. While monodevelop is free, Xamarin is not, and also to deploy to any iDevice you need to pay the yearly Apple developer fee ($100), so we still need to figure how far we can make things open. But the core part providing all accessibility and functionality of the SmartScope is 100% open.

We realize that we left Windows Phone unattended. We can't really give you any good reason for this. The good news is that all of the tools we're using also support Windows Phone, so it shouldn't cost too much effort to support it. But it would be dreaming to expect it to run out of the box, so we cannot commit on Windows Phone support at the time of our product launch. So we will support it, but exactly when will depend a bit on the requests we get from the community, or on the activity of the community itself :)

• Android version 4.0+
• USB host support

You can check your android version from the settings > about menu

To know if your device has USB host support, we recommend checking your device specs on GSM arena. In the Data section, the USB spec should mention USB host or MHL, like for the Moto G for example.

You'll also need an micro-USB OTG cable, which is available from the store.