for learning electronics? why? I'd say an oscilloscope way before a logic analyzer as it allows you to see what circuits are doing. Learning what analog circuits are doing is much more useful for learning than seeing digital signalling.
I think most people getting into electronics won't be doing analog designs. They'll probably be messing around with various sensor devkits (sparkfun, adafruit, etc.) and Arduinos/RaspberryPis/ESP8266. With these you'll be messing around with primarily I2C and SPI which is why a cheap logic analyzer is cool also they are much cheaper than an oscilloscope and some have some analog functionality.
> With these you'll be messing around with primarily I2C and SPI
On the other hand, if you get the right cheap oscilloscope, such as a Rigol 1054z, which goes for $350 [1] and add the $180 "serial bus analysis" option, the 'scope will know how to trigger on and decode I2C, SPI, RS232 protocols.
If you don't mind using cracks, you can enable the serial bus analysis option for free, and also double the memory and the bandwidth.
Rigol's response to the crack is interesting. The cracks work because they used a key length for a cryptographic key in their firmware that is short enough to fairly easily brute force. It's hard to see how this could be accidental. Further suggesting that it is not accidental is the fact that they could have easily fixed this once people figured it out, but they have not.
That has led to speculation that they purposefully did this, so that hobbyists could easily crack the thing and get all the features.
Professional users could also crack it, but they would be reluctant to do so, because of potential liability issues. If you are a pro, and you design something the ends up used in a system that causes harm, and it comes out you were using hacked test equipment, the plaintiff's lawyers will be all over that.
If that is the case, it was an excellent strategy. Over on /r/electronics or /r/AskElectronics, you ask for a 'scope recommendation as a hobbyist or student, and almost all the responses will say get the DS1054z and crack it.
maybe, but even with those, unless it's because you really want to look at I2C / SPI, mostly that just works.
I'm not sure what people mean when they say they want to learn electronics, whether they are talking about getting a micro based kit and hooking things up to it and programming it or whether they want to understand circuits and components and how they work. If it's the latter, then go with a scope.
True, it's good to see the scope while poking around. Also scopes can do higher voltages than salaes' analyzers. But to their defense, the newer analog + digital analysers are really decent for $200.
Annnd they doubled their prices, oscilloscope it is.
Why not both? I somewhat recently purchased the EspoTek Labrador. It's both and a lot more for roughly $30. Of course it's nowhere near as good as single purpose/professional grade equipment, but for learning it's a great device.
