New from HiTechnic: The MiniScope

HiTechnic told me they were working on this little gem a while back but it’s finally here!  The HiTechnic MiniScope!  This is so cool it’s not even funny!  It’s very small and can actually be plugged right into a bread board!  That’s very useful if you want to combine it with the HiTechnic SuperPro, of course.  Now you can see exactly what your SuperPro is doing.  It comes with a PC application that displays several channels at once and their signals, as they come in.

The hardware specs:

• Two analog inputs with an input range of -5 to 5 volts
• Four binary inputs with input range from 0 to 5 volts. (voltage >1.6 is a 1, otherwise 0)
• Sampling rate up to 100,000 samples per second (up to 10kHz signals)
• Hardware trigger on either a positive or negative slope on A or B analog inputs channels
• Trigger on any logical combination of the four binary inputs

The 10kHz sample speed means you can watch standard I2C traffic between your NXT and the sensor as well.  Handy if you’re trying to debug your home-brew sensor!  Keep in mind that it will not work well with RS485 speeds above 9600 Baud or the 30kHz I2C speeds that some NXT firmwares are capable of.

The MiniScope is priced very reasonably at just $56.95, so if you’re like me and you love tinkering with this kind of stuff, then this baby should definitely be part of your arsenal.  You can find the product page here: [LINK].