The oscilloscope is an essential tool for anyone working in electronics. Whether you’re working in electronics service, production, testing R&D or in your home workshop, you need an oscilloscope. If you listen to a bunch of technical people chatting about their scopes, they’ll talk about their bandwidth or whether they have colour displays, depth of memory or portability but the probes rarely get mentioned. In fact, most users don’t think about their probes until they hear the sickening crunch underfoot which tells them they shouldn’t have left them dangling off the bench onto the floor. There are many varieties of “specialist” probes: active-FET probes, differential-floating probes, current- sensing probes are just some we could mention.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
