Product tryout: Circuitgear CGR-101 USB Oscilloscope
Circuitgear CGR-101 USB Oscilloscope from SysComp Electronic Design
I recently tried this combination 20 Msample/s simultaneous sampling oscilloscope, function generator, PWM signal generator, and digital I/O module. While it works, getting it to work is more tedious than it should be.
The software and driver installation process, not usually an issue, gets in the way. It has too many steps and it you don’t follow the onscreen instructions exactly, you may never get the instrument and your PC to communicate. That’s what happened to me. I needed a clean Windows installation before I could try again.
Once I had the oscilloscope working, I found it to be a good educational tool. Syscomp provided a simple test circuit—a transformer—that lets me evaluate the instrument. The software is easy to use once you get through the installation and I was able to characterize. A VNA mode is a nice feature, letting you quickly generate Bode plots for gain and phase.
The oscilloscope would benefit by having more triggers. Level trigger is your only choice. Pulse width triggering would add value. Also, you have no way to trigger the oscilloscope on a digital pattern unless you write your own application using the instruments programming commands. That’s unlike the Link Instruments MSO-19, which has that ability although it has only one oscilloscope channel. At just $179, the Syscomp CGR-101 is a versatile instrument, if you follow the install directions.
