Hello fellow tinkerers and electronics geeks alike!
After seeing all the awesome expansion cards that this community has created, I thought that I would dip my toes in the water as well with something that I plan on creating when my uConsole arrives.
I dare say I will be be using @Vitaly’s uPico Expansion Card as a very solid foundation for my own card, as there are a couple of Oscilloscope signal reading programs that already exist and are Linux/Pi compatible that can utilise the RasPi Pico IO to receive and potentially even send oscillating signals.
Software such as PiScope is something I’m looking into that could show promise, however I’m still on the hunt for more fleshed out Oscilloscope software that I could interface with.
A point of possible issue would be the RF BNC connector that oscilloscope probes use, of which, the uConsole may not fit most styles of on-PCB BNC connectors. I have been looking at the Amphenol Connex 112640, which is a PCB edge mounted BNC connector, however I am not 100% sure how the Expansion Cards interact with the body of the uConsole.
Anyways, this idea is still very early days, however myself, and I would imagine at least a few others could definitely find use in an Expansion Card such as this, and I’d love to collaborate with the community in making this come to life!
What about using edge-mounted SMB connectors and an SMB-to-BNC adaptor (or adaptor cable)?
The SMB connectors should be roughly proportional to the uConsole size here (the rest obviously is not).
This could be a handy addition.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of a digital multimeter expansion card. Something that can log data and be scriptable (e.g. do an action when the voltage crosses a setpoint, or the probes go open circuit, something like that).
I definitely like this idea, I was not aware of this smaller standard of RF connections, and it was one of the bigger issues with this idea - trying to fit the BNC connectors.
It seems there could be a couple of options for an RF adapter - some more available than others. SMB edge-mount - far less available, but a nicer looking solution. SMA edge-mount - your tried-and-true RF connector, that you can get adapters for to go to a standard BNC connector for a probe.
The next question mark becomes; how many channels would we want? Do we want math input channels? In theory it seems we can fit 4 input-only channels, however that will lose us the room for say an output for a signal generator, which could be very helpful for diagnosing audio gear/signal manipulation devices.
I often just need 2 analog inputs & you can hook up a small digital logic analyzer through USB, so that leaves physical (and processing) space for some output stuff, if it’s needed.
