Directory contents for equipment:

Dergen tooling

This page exists to give a writeup on the different kinds of tools and electronics in use here. There'll be a short description of what the thing does, and whether or not we can recommend it for others :D

Changelog

• 2024/12/23: Initial writeup

Machining

For 3D machining related purposes, we currently only really have one thing: Our 3D printer. It's got its own page here

Electronics

Scopes/Capturing

Saleae 8

Everyone's heard of them! The Saleae family of devices is a must-have for data capture. The one here does 8 channels at a comfortable 50MSPS digital I/O.

What we like:

• Great data capture software (no fuss with DRM and it's among the best)
• tons of protocol decoding options
• very fast, and thanks to the Run-Length encoding you can grab huge data frames

What we don't like:

• Price is a bit high
• It's only a pure input device, not I/O
• Analog measurements are very basic

Analog Discovery 3

The AD3 is a Digilent USB-Oscilloscope. Unlike the Saleae, it puts its focus on analog measurements. For this, it boasts two fully-differential, +-25V input channels at 125MSPS and 30MHz bandwidth. The internal capture buffer can do about 32k samples, which is almost always enough for hobby use, same for the speed - and if your USB connection is fast enough, you can stream samples continously at about 10MSPS into your computer RAM. If that wasn't enough, it also has TWO single-ended AWGs with about 10MHz output bandwidth :D

In addition to this, though, it has 16 Digital I/O channels. These channels can be used for data capturing and basic protocol decoding (less flexible than the Saleae), but the killer feature is the very advanced cross-domain triggering - you can, for example, trigger the 'scope based on receiving a very specific SPI packet, or you can fire off digital outputs after a trigger to inject a packet or fault, which is extremely handy for certain communication analysis. Because yes, unlike the Saleae, you can also send data! That comes in SUPER handy at times.

The software is also extensive. Like the Saleae one, WaveForms doesn't need fussy DRM, and has all features out of the box. And there are a lot - WaveForms has enough features to make even modern scopes blush, and it's extremely usable. It can do everything from basic Wave captures, to lock-in amplifier read-out, FFTs; it can use the AWGs to perform network analysis, do 3D plots of your data, etc. You can even script it via Javascript or Python, which is super handy :D

It's a perfect companion to the Saleae.

Probing

There's one device we highly recommend for probing electronics:
A set of PCBite "floating" probes. They might be expensive and look weird, but these spidery little things actually work really good. Not to mention that they have some great higher-speed oscilloscope probes, and Digital I/O capable ones, it pairs like bread and butter with the AD3 and Saleae.

If you've ever been annoyed by having to deal with very carefully pushing oscilloscope probes against a PCB and hoping they didn't slip... These are for you. Oh, and they make everything you do look like necromancy. 10/10

Programming

The programmers we most often use are:

• A cheap STLink clone (dime a dozen, all work the same)
• The ESP Prog. It's just a nicely wrapped FTDI for an appropriate price, which is always very useful to have :D