Calling All Engineers: Share your Must-Have Tools!

My must have tool is the ADALM2000 and I'm not just saying that because I work for Analog Devices!

It’s an unassuming USB-hosted instrument but it has an oscilloscope, signal generator, logic analyzer, network analyzer, spectrum analyzer, etc. etc.

I first got one during the pandemic and used it for practical demonstrations of electronics principles to graduate engineers at our customers who couldn't get into their lab at the time.

It's a great learning tool and there is a wealth of information on StudentZone if you're new to electronics or a little rusty in my case.  I used it regularly in anger when I was an FAE, to look at SPI transactions on an eval board I was debugging, for example.  I'm also using it to validate the performance of a little guitar amplifier home project I'm working on when I get the chance.

My plan is to access it through Python using Libm2k to automate some of my test setups and to manipulate the captured data with Numpy and Matplotlib. MarkThoren thanks for your help with this!

My must have tool is the ADALM2000 and I'm not just saying that because I work for Analog Devices!

It’s an unassuming USB-hosted instrument but it has an oscilloscope, signal generator, logic analyzer, network analyzer, spectrum analyzer, etc. etc.

I first got one during the pandemic and used it for practical demonstrations of electronics principles to graduate engineers at our customers who couldn't get into their lab at the time.

It's a great learning tool and there is a wealth of information on StudentZone if you're new to electronics or a little rusty in my case.  I used it regularly in anger when I was an FAE, to look at SPI transactions on an eval board I was debugging, for example.  I'm also using it to validate the performance of a little guitar amplifier home project I'm working on when I get the chance.

My plan is to access it through Python using Libm2k to automate some of my test setups and to manipulate the captured data with Numpy and Matplotlib. MarkThoren thanks for your help with this!

Of course! And I agree 100%, it's the most useful box on my bench, too. I'm debugging a device driver right now with it. Yup I COULD drive to the office and hunt down an expensive logic analyzer, but why?

Get started with libm2k here: https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/libm2k