DSO138 oscilloscope Interface Critique

I had a small DIY oscilloscope that I assembled and 3D printed a case for it. I have used it for around two years, and have used it to probe various electronics. But the interface is extremely finicky to use, and it took me around a month to learn how to use it fluently. Therefore, I would like to offer several design changes that could dramatically improve usability and learnability.

The interface includes a screen in the center, three three-position slide switches on the left, and four buttons on the side. The screen displays waveform, mode, timeframe, and voltage range. The first slide switch selects coupling, which are AC, DC, and ground. The second slide switch selects the voltage, and the third selects the multiplier. For example, if 0.1V is selected and the multiplier is 5, then each square on the screen has a height of 0.5V.

First, the things that were done right given the constraints; Numer one, the decision of putting the coupling mode to a physical switch. Because this oscilloscope costs $25 dollars compared to a “normal oscilloscope” at around $250, a cheap voltage regulation circuit has to be used, which causes the oscilloscope to lose its accuracy every time the voltage level is changed. This is fixed by setting the coupling mode to “ground” and calibrate it from there, and unlike another mode settings, the inclusion of a physical switch made this process a lot faster. On that note, one critique I have about is that I wish that there was a dedicated button to perform this operation, but this might not be possible due to physical board space.

The two main critiques I have about this oscilloscope is one that there the designer tried to fit every setting and graphic on to the “home” screen. Which is good if there are only a few things that need changing. However, there are far too many settings and elements. Thus, some setting does not have text, only an icon which is very small (8 pixels tall) this makes it hard to determine what the icons mean. Furthermore, around half of the settings are hidden, and only activated by pressing a combination of the +, — and set buttons. NONE of the hidden settings are indicated in any way from the interface. For example, when I built my oscilloscope, it did not display the voltage, frequency, duty cycle, which are essential functions of an oscilloscope, which lead me to think that it is broken. I only discovered how to bring it up upon watching a video of a person operating the scope. The action is pressing the + and set button to bring up the statics menu. Other settings are brought up by a similar mechanism. A way to fix this is to make a menu system; upon pressing a button, a menu pops up and the user can select each item and decide to turn it on or off.

The second complaint is that the control of many elements is controlled by the + and — buttons, which takes a long time to make adjustments. For example, scrubbing from one side of the time frame to the other takes 12 seconds. Which is forever in terms of an average person’s patience. Imagine taking 12 seconds to adjust the volume on your phone. This also applies to setting coupling range. An improvement to this design is to replace the +, — and set buttons to a rotary encoder, therefore the act of scrolling through value and time range can be easily expressed as rotating a dial. Thus making the oscilloscope much more intuitive to use.

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