It's an OK price for what it does
Anyone messed with this? The software seems decent, but I have a really hard time believing the specs that they list for that price.
Any thoughts?
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9263
There's nothing particularly surprising about that device for that price. It's a single channel analog input + 8 channels of digital input + triggering, ram, and a micro-controller. With today's components, the only hard part is probably shielding the A/D converter properly. Everything else is VERY straightforward.
I'm certain that it works as advertised (Spark Fun has been around a while, and the stuff I've bought from them has been just fine), it's just not a very powerful system. But if you never want to analyze fast clocks (I wouldn't try to look at anything analog faster than 20Mhz, and even at that rate you're not getting too many samples per wave).
I don't know about the software, but I'd bet it performs it's basic functions just fine.
If all you want it for is debugging old Missile Command boards (highest clock is 10 Mhz), then it's perfectly fine. If you want to look at signals on cutting edge hardware, then it's not real useful. Further, the limit of 1000 samples per channel is kind of small, but not unusable.
Other posters have noted that you can get old analog scopes with 20Mhz bandwidth fairly cheap on Ebay. One thing to remember is the analog and digital scopes are used for fundamentally different sorts of analysis.
Analog scopes are constantly triggering and showing you the waveform. This makes them great for seeing certain types of problems, because you'll see changes in the waveform over time. Awesome when you have clocks, sync signals, etc, etc. Since analog scopes are basically using the input (via amplifiers) to deflect the beam on the screen, you're seeing very much exactly what's going on after the trigger point.
Digital scopes are more 'trigger once, then update the display'. They are great for looking in detail at a particular event (especially if you can set the scope to trigger on a logic analyzer pattern match). Better digital scopes (I don't think this one does) have modes where they are constantly sampling, and you can choose to see the samples from before the trigger instead of the samples after the trigger.
Summary: It's probably about the right price for the money. If you only have money for one piece of equipment, and you need both logic analysis AND scope functions, then this is a pretty good deal. If you can get by with just a scope, then buying used is probably a better deal. As long as you can find someone trustworthy to buy from.
I personally have an analog scope I bought off Ebay several years ago. I don't need a scope very often, and it suits my needs well enough.