Haasoscope Pro: A 2 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope up for Crowdfunding
Andy Haas, an associate professor of Physics at New York University and the creator of the previously successful Haasoscope, has once again introduced an upgraded model: the Haasoscope Pro. This new oscilloscope has an increased bandwidth of 2 GHz and offers a resolution of 12 bits. The Pro version features a significantly improved sampling rate of 3.2 GS/s, compared to the original Haasoscope’s 125 MS/s.
Currently featured in upcoming projects on CrowdSupply, one of the standout characteristics of the Haasoscope Pro, as highlighted on the product page, is its bandwidth. This is particularly important in the world of electronic circuit design, where engineers prioritize the oscilloscope’s bandwidth as a critical specification. A wider bandwidth allows users to analyze time-dependent signals with greater accuracy, avoiding distortion or attenuation.
How to choose the right oscilloscope bandwidth?
One important guideline for selecting an oscilloscope is based on the Nyquist theorem, which states that to accurately sample and reconstruct a continuous-time signal without encountering aliasing, the sampling frequency must be at least twice the highest frequency component present in the signal.
However, simply adhering to the Nyquist rate is often insufficient; to accurately capture the shape of waveforms during fast transients or sharp edges, the sampling rate should be significantly higher than twice the highest frequency component.
Features of Haasoscope Pro
The Haasoscope Pro is marketed as an affordable alternative to expensive test equipment and is designed to capture fast signal transitions (rise times) as brief as 250 ps. Standard communication protocols, such as DDR3, HDMI, and even Ethernet, typically exhibit rise times of around 250 ps, while microprocessors and FPGAs generally have rise times of 500 ps or less. Furthermore, to accommodate some basic digital chips that may have rise times as short as 200 ps, two Haasoscope Pro can be paired together to achieve an oversampling capability, reducing the limit to 175 ps.
When initially launched in 2018, the original Haasoscope was priced at $119 for the fully assembled unit with firmware, and $149 for the Haasoscope, which included probes, a USB serial adapter, a USB blaster, and a screen. As time has passed since the original project launch, the price for the Haasoscope Pro may be higher than the initial offer; however, no public details regarding the current pricing or project launch date have been disclosed.
In response to inquiries about the pricing and launch timeline, Andy Haas told Electronics Lab,
“I am going to keep the price below $1000, and hopefully, it will be significantly less than that. We aim to launch later this month and hope to raise a minimum of $50k, but we can raise significantly more.”
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