They both increase visibility on embedded systems, but what are they good at?

In the world of general-purpose equipment used to troubleshoot embedded systems, oscilloscopes hold a central place, as ‘all-around’ tool for all kinds of embedded systems. Digital and mixed-signal oscilloscopes sometimes provide high-level functionalities – such as protocol decoding.

Still, from physical layer to application software, debugging (and verifying, and testing, …) embedded system will likely require ‘more than just a scope’. Byte Paradigm recently investigated the reasons why engineers use other types of general-purpose equipment. We were especially interested in the technical value of digital data logger for embedded system debugging. Figure 1 below summarizes the main findings.

These results originate from systematic informal discussions with visitors at the 2012 editions of Embedded World (Nuremberg, Germany) and Design West (San Jose, USA).

Figure 1: Overlapping areas show that tools are often used interchangeably or together.
Colored arrows show the main reasons why a user would prefer to switch from one Type of equipment to another. Some intersecting areas are labeled with frequently-mentioned tool use.

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