Seeed Studio DSO Nano Mini-Review

I recently got my Seeedstudio DSO Nano, a digital storage oscilloscope, a few weeks ago for my birthday and I just now finally got around to actually using it for something.

I have to say I’m very impressed with it in many ways, although there were are few things I didn’t like. The first part everyone always notices is how bright and vivid the screen is. Truly impressive. The device feels very solid overall, the buttons are a little weak but I don’t mind. One thing I didn’t like was having to use the yellow tape to put the metal back on. I thought that was not very professional – the back should snap into place. The included probes are also a little fragile, but people have reported that you can make your own with an adapter so not a big deal. There are also very many review videos on Youtube of the DSO. I even recorded my own short one.

The initial software that the DSO came with was alright but a little glitchy. I had 2.01 when I turned it on. I thought the interface was not very friendly and some kind folk on the forum pointed me to the Paul firmware which improved things. That is the power of open source (one of the reasons I got the DSO). I wouldn’t recommend the DSO for serious analyzing because its save feature can only take a single snapshot (not good for logic analyzing). However, this might change in the future. The reason I bought it though was to do debugging on simple mostly-digital circuits I build – and for those cases this is just the device!

I’ve also learned that the firmware currently does not support microSD cards larger than 1GB. I originally tried to use a brand new 2GB card without any luck and ended up returning it for a 512MB one. Not a big problem since the save files are only a couple of KB, but it will become harder to find small supported cards in the future.

The cheap price point compared to other oscilloscopes along with the fairly active forums are really a nice touch. Most other digital oscilloscopes are either too expensive or not portable enough. All in all, I am very happy with my purchase.

Oh, and in case you haven’t seen, there is a Google Code project with some additional documentation. I hope to see more documentation for unique uses and customizations in the future.