I’ll say it up front, in case you missed it like I did, the power supplies on the Analog Discovery 3 cannot do current limitng, which is a huge bummer. No constant current limiting for you sir! Also, just go ahead and set the power limit to 5.5W please…
Failed Calibration Coefficients For some reason, going through the calibration wizard in Waveforms (as of June 2023) introduced offsets and gain errors which were different for both scope channels. This doesn’t make sense, as both scope channels are calibrated with the waveform generator channel 1, after that has itself been calibrated, of course. My failed calibration attempts were done with a calibrated Keithley DMM7510, so basically with the best multimeter in the world save for the insane 8....
When I got my Analog Discovery 3, I made the decision to also purchase the BNC adapter board. Trying it out with some OWON scope probes I got from Amazon, it unfortunately didn’t cut the mustard. This was the most square I could get by twiddling with the compensation adjustment. To prove that I haven’t goofed it somehow, this is at the opposite end of the compensation range: This waveform ain’t even square at this point....
The Analog Discovery 3 is a great debugging tool, but as I discovered here in a note on using it with 10x scope probes, the input capacitance was too high for the probes to be compensated correctly. Custom LNA design To combat this, I decided to design an amplifier that would have a low input capacitance so that we fall within the 5-35pF compensation which is typical of these 10x scope probes....
Why I bought it in the first place The Analog Discovery 3 seemed like a band-aid solution to an ongoing problem I have been facing here at Cambridge: how do I get my own oscilloscope so that I can get back in to doing electronics without having to rely on the few shared scopes at the Dyson Center (the Dyson Center is sort of like a makerspace for engineering students, it isn’t great though…)...