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Let's say that the new high tech scope is $2500, - $500 for equivalent, older equipment. Man-hour costs $50/hr. When the new tech stuff saves 40 hours in labor, the equipment would have paid for itself. So on a small company level, you have to gauge the usage, estimate the savings of one over the other per hour, and determine when the unit will pay for itself, and after that, the savings become a profit(over the old equipment)... how about that.Quote:
Originally Posted by N8YX
And costs from $550 to $1400... or so See my post...Quote:
Originally Posted by KC2UGV
The controllers appear to be the most expensive part of this equation, and I don't see a way around that. However, if the equipment is inexpensive enough, it can still offset the costs of newer gear.Quote:
Originally Posted by N1LAF
Did you look at the eBay link I provided?Quote:
Originally Posted by N1LAF
That $40K is the "used" price. New approaches $200K, depending on the options selected.
$2500 won't buy a high-end instrument of commercial quality and durability. If companies could get by with such cheap investitures they would gladly do it...but...there's simply no replacement for displacement. Or in this case, robustness and careful design.
I treat any instrument I use with the delicacy it deserves. Care to guess how many others don't?
The older Tek and HP stuff was often built to MIL-2000D right out of the box. Today's imported equipment? Riiight. Drop one of those with a spinning hard drive inside and it's gone.
And there's that entire "hard drive" concept in an instrument. Let's also factor in planned obsolescence and an absolute lack of factory support, especially where the newer imports are concerned.
Big business can claim capital expenditures (in whole or in part) as tax write-offs, and can purchase new equipment as it becomes needed. I, on the other hand, cannot.
But we're here to talk about GPIB, not running a business. The thread with graphs and such is somewhere over this way, I believe. ===============>
You might want to check these out...Quote:
Originally Posted by N8YX
http://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/mso2000-dpo2000
4 channel, $2400 price range. Does everything that I need to do.
2 channel for $1200
And stuff like this is used at shipyards....
Like I said, GPIB is going extinct. Network aware devices and net appliances is where everything is going, sooner or later. Phone companies know this, so do cable companies.
For the hobbyist, use a PIC microcontroller with serial interface, works fine. Easy to work with. Analog and digital I/O available. AND there is support/devices for network communications and USB interfaces.
Check these out - really cool, easy to use. They really do work well
http://www.pctestinstruments.com/
I think the point is to use a lot of great (and now inexpensive) surplus stuff in a hobby setting where one can have schedule-less fun and learn a bunch without shelling out much coinage.
It does look like there are a pile of options on the GPIB stuff (never studied the protocol m'self, but I bet the hardware interface is butt-simple). Everything from the popcorn processor homebrew solutions (PIC, Arduino) to commercial GPIB-Ethernet adapters like the Prologix (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8841) are possible from the looks of it. $199 seems pricey for the Prologix. It looks like there are a few experimenters dabbling in this, but not as many as I would have thought.
Do like the Ethernet approach to what you're doing Fred -- adapter on each instrument "bussed" via Ethernet hub/switch. Uh, but not real attractive at $200 per instrument.
Reminds me of my recent pursuit concerning IPX support in Ubuntu.
Start adding up all the cable costs, I expect they will be $35 per cable per device.
Anyways, why not a GPIB to Ethernet using PIC processors? May be cheaper than the cable.....
;)
Good point.Quote:
Originally Posted by kf0rt
There is a lot of inexpensive used equipment on the market that one would have found only in top-end design labs of the 80's, 90's and early 2000's. The new equipment is great, but the old stuff does much of what the new stuff does. A few decades ago, it was a big evolutionary step when microprocessors and GPIB interfaces were added to test equipment. The developments that have followed since (such as more sophisticated networking, Internet awareness, Ethernet/USB ports, internal high capacity storage devices, etc.) are important, but in a hobbyist world, they can be addressed in older test equipment by adding external devices connected to the GPIB port. An exception would be cases where large data sets need to be transferred rapidly. The GPIB port is plenty fast for many/most applications, but it's not Gigabit Ethernet!
My old Hewlett Packard 8753C VNA (3GHz, w/time domain option), combined with a 2-port S-parameter testset, cables and calibration kit cost me less than $3K on today's used market (note: I did have to repair a few issues with the equipment). To buy comparable new products, from Agilent, would probably run in the $45K to $50K range. Of course if the thing breaks, I've got to fix it. But, operations manuals, calibration manuals, service manuals and schematics for a lot of old Hewlett Packard, Tektronix and other test equipment are freely available for download on the Internet. Hewlett Packard, now Agilent, has been remarkably open to providing free documentation for their discontinued and obsolete products.
Needs to be open sourced and nearly free. My impression was that the goal was to do some instrumentin' on the cheap, not become a GPIB egg-spurt. Yeah, it could be done (design and program your own interface), but I didn't get the impression that was Fred's goal.Quote:
Originally Posted by N1LAF