Back when I worked for an Oscilloscope company, we were pretty proud of our differential probes. Even the “low-bandwidth” probes were still around 1GHz of bandwidth.
Daniel Kramnik built an active differential probe and looks like he is seeing about 400MHz usable bandwidth. And really, it looks relatively flat. Not bad for a DIY effort. I’m impressed.
Pretty amazing to think about the possibility of building your own (active) scope probes.
Popular on eBay are old test equipment like Spectrum Analyzers, Oscilloscopes, and Multimeters. HPDisk by Gustafsson Anders creates a virtual GPIB interface that stores data to a SD-Card.This is done by emulating a special HP disk drive, that some HP instruments know how to write to when connected. (As Anders points out, this is not emulating a built-in floppy drive.)
Keep reading if you aren’t familiar with GPIB.
Long before USB became the standard I/O interface in the computing world, bench-top instruments used HPIB. This was the “HP Interface Bus” used by Hewlett-Packard in the early days of their test equipment. It enabled instruments to share data and be automated by “desktop computers”.
Eventually HPIB evolved into GPIB and the IEEE-488 standard was created. Until about 2000, most instruments supported a true GPIB/IEEE488 hardware connector. Slowly that evolved into USB-based virtual connectors (like a virtual serial port).
Go back to 1975. The idea of a computer at home was something that only happened in Science Fiction books. When the Altair 8800 was introduced, not only could you have a computer at home–you could build it yourself!
For some “computer” is a bit liberal. Based on the Intel 8080, the “computer” supported some toggle switches and LEDs on the front panel. As Gates explains in this video, there wasn’t even any kind of interactive terminal.
(“Graphen” by AlexanderAlUS – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Every day a new application involving the seemingly miraculous material Graphene is announced. For example, being in the capacitor industry, I am asked often if my employer uses it. Before answering the question, I usually have to explain what Graphene is and the challenges in producing it.
The lack of supply and limited (real) commercial applications leads me to think of it as Unobtanium… at least, for the near future.
Having good libraries in EAGLE is critical to making schematic capture and PCB design fast. Dave at element14 put together a top 10 library link, which includes the list below.
Remember, if you’re having trouble Add Parts, you might want to look at this tutorial on enabling EAGLE libraries.
