I am interested in working in a custom distributed TDMA protocol. Is there any (USB even) oscilloscope (maybe with FFT) that a budget of 1500USD could buy for making the life of developers easier when debugging the system? In general, would the functionalities that this low amount of money could buy, make the purchase worthy?
Forget the FFT idea, nothing in that budget is going to go up to UWB frequencies.
If you are dealing with the hardware or driver side of things some form of scope is very worthwhile.
I just used a basic 50MHz scope for bringing up the hardware and firmware a DW3000 board. Mostly for monitoring the SPI bus and interrupt lines and measuring the times between packets etc…
Exactly what features you need depend on how you work. e.g. A scope/logic analyser that could decode the SPI bus and tell me the data being sent could potentially have been of benefit but I’m not sure quite where, if I needed to know the data on the bus I used the jtag debugger on the processor rather than trying to read the bus directly. But if I suspected that there was some data corruption going on then maybe an easier way to read the data on the bus would have been nice.
If you are looking at a TDoA system then something that lets you check the time sync between units would be handy but just about any scope will do that until you get down to ns accuracies. And at that point your measurement method and wire lengths become so critical I wouldn’t trust the scope too much anyway and would be looking for some other verification method.
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