Making Oscilloscopes Easier for the User

" they resisted elimination of traditional interaction techniques, such as knobs, buttons, and soft keys."

I guess there is something to 1 million + years of evolution of the opposing thumb.

Regardless, marketing keeps trying to reinvent the 'knob', regressing in ways that are obviously more awkward and dysfunctional, but really 'cool' looking because form leads function.

I only occasionally use oscilloscopes. Back in college and in my first years as an engineer oscilloscopes had lots of knobs, and the function of each knob was clearly labelled.

Now when I need to use an o'scope it drives me insane. The functions are all done with pushbuttons and menus. Sometimes the function I need to use is buried 3 or 4 levels down in some unknown sub-menu that takes forever to find. Total aggravation.

I think every manufacture that makes something for people to use should take an extensive course on Human Factors as driven by the aviation and space industries.

Aviation doesn't mess around and spends a lot of time proving the methods and ideologies that goes into interface design. Most commercial designers are taking the charge of function follows form because eye candy sells.

Who asked them to do that study ?, just see what happened with windows 8. Eventhough I'm not an engineer, I do a lot of engineering, and I like having all functions available and under my control, not buried under sub-menus, as usbport quite correctly states, or activated by a weird icon that tells you nothing about what it does. Heck, I still don't like icons too much, I gave a lesson of efficiency to a tech fellow, drawing in CAD by typing commands while he was using icons and menus, he couldn't even bite the dust, 'cus he was left way behind it !.

Now, leave tech stuff to us they way we need it, and focus on making people more stupid every year (we are a very small market anyway); but shame on you designers and teachers for making newer generations of engineers unable to build anything that is not Arduino based, even if it is THOUSANDS of times slower, less resolved and accurate than its traditionally built counterpart.

I better stop right here, I feel a violent rant comming.

I have an O scope that i built when i was 13, a Heathkit. Knobs, on/off switch and such, even has tubes and around a foot long CRT. Still works.

I started off with one of those, a big boxy 5 MHz scope. Back in the days of analog scopes, it felt like you were looking at the "real signal", not a recorded copy.

Digital scopes have some weird effects sometimes for signals like repetitive pulses where the sampling may make the pulses have differing amplitudes. It's disconcerting when changing the sweep speed changes the characteristics of the signal.

Try finding a runt pulse with that analog scope.

Only premium priced scopes catch some of those real world low repetition or random pulses, don't let advertising BS with pre-fabricated signals mislead you. No more than a few per cent of input signal time share ever makes it to RAM or DSP in high sweep rates, and this only for hi-end digital scopes. I use scopes from both worlds and although triggering goodies, memory feature etc of the digital world is priceless, some 7 usefull bits of actual resolution from a theoretical 8 bits on mainstreem scopes, really sucks. Interpolation methods are just beutifiers, they don't give any new information about signal. My point is that digital technology on scopes is far from perfect, and disadvantages like TOTAL unserviceability without vendor's help is decisive to how much I would spent. S.M.

I have both a Tektronix 100 MHZ analog and 100 MHZ digital and to be honest I generally trust what I see on the analog far more than the digital.

For lower frequency data logging the digital it's great but thats such a rare thing to use the scope is almost more of a conversation piece for my electronics bench than a useful tool.

It can do far more than what I use it for but I have yet to ever figure out how to make it do so.