I have some great news regarding the site. As long time readers probably remember, I’ve done several hacks with my Picoscope 2204 in the past, including a $5 logic analyzer and the latest composite video decoding article. Since I really like their product, I contacted Picotech and asked if they would be interested in working together more closely.

To my delight, the friendly people at Picotech had also noticed the hacks and agreed to sponsor the Code and Life with the extremely capable Picoscope 3206B. In return, I’ve added a “Sponsored by” box to the right which features Picotech and their Picoscope products, and will continue to feature Picoscope-related stuff in the future, and they’ll also have the permission to use those articles on their own. My warmest thanks to Picotech for their donation!

The first concrete result of the new, beefier 200 MHz scope is that I was able to redo many of the measurements in my Raspberry Pi GPIO benchmark. While excellent otherwise, my older Picoscope 2204 with 10 MHz bandwith and 100 MS/s sampling rate was not capable of analyzing the 14-22 MHz waveforms generated by the Pi very accurately, while this was no problem for the 3206B which has 10x the maximum sampling rate: See Benchmarking Raspberry Pi GPIO Speed for details!

Now that I have a scope with more buffer memory, I’m also going to revisit the composite video decoding and see if I can get full resolution, maybe even colors out of my Raspberry Pi composite output using the 3206B. After I get some experience with the new scope, I’ll likely do a review similar to my previous Picoscope 2204 review.