After many years, my 2012-era MacBookPro began rebooting so often that I could not continue. Furthermore it was often losing track of Arduinos plugged into the USB, and while that may have been an issue with the Arduino IDE, I was unable to fix it, and it was annoying.

Let’s take a minute to honor the MacBookPro. It’s been to Burning Man at every year since 2015, I’ve taken it to around 20 countries, I wrote an immense amount of code, email, and prose on it. It hasn’t been my primary work computer for at least 5 years, but it’s been in the lab, and it’s been the host for a stack of thunderbolt-connected RAID drives. It’s a very fine little beast, and I expect it will have a dignified retirement.

However, after the fifth reboot of the antique MacBookPro in a single day a couple weeks ago, I lost patience and bought a System76 Meerkat mini. I’ve been a happy manager of a System76 server for about five years (it’s been great except for a frequently-failing cooling system that I’ve replaced 4 or 5 times now), so I’m happy to do more business with these folks.

But while I waited for the new computer to be delivered, I managed to use a RaspberryPi 4 to program some Arduinos using vim, python, and platformio (platformio is amazeballs). I’d had a lot of trouble getting platformio running under MacOS, which is weird and surprising, but under rasbian-linux, it Just Worked. Using a RPi as if it was a real computer was great! It got me psyched for a new desktop linux machine.

I used desktop+laptop linux from about 1999-2007. I tried again in 2015, and it wasn’t successful. There are too many little connections that Apple makes completely transparent that I couldn’t get a linux box to do, even with a huge amount of fiddly work. However, I think that in the lab it should go better. Here I think around 95% of my work is in a browser and a terminal, and linux should do well.

The Meerkat arrived yesterday, and it’s totes adorbs. In the photo above, it’s mounted on the wall on the right. The photo below shows the unboxing.

It’s just a box. Put video in with HDMI, attach a keyboard+mouse, add a network connection, and we’re off!

First, the Pop!OS is a terrific set of themes for gnome. It looks fantastic, and so far I’m really enjoying their version of tiling windows and workspaces. The hardware and the GUI tuning make the UI as responsive as anything I’ve ever used. The keybindings are all a little off from my MacOS muscle memory, but it’s close enough.

In about a half-hour, I had my key apps running: the Arduino IDE from the pop shop, Spotify from Ubuntu’s snap installation utility, and Scopy for the M2K multi-instrument in a flatpak.

It’s weird to have all these different package managers. There’s the "pop shop" and of course apt-get (because Pop is Ubuntu which is Debian), and snap and flatpack and the Adruino IDE’s library manager. I use anaconda python and I can add libraries with conda but also directly through python’s pip. For math, I use RStudio which leverages the Comprehensive R Archive Network, and the TinyTex package to write Rmarkdown and LaTeX. TinyTeX uses the tlmgr manager for LaTeX sty files. Platformio manages it’s own libraries for microcontroller hacking. Even my editor has it’s own package manager.

It’s going to be a headache to keep these straight, esp popshop-apt-snap-flatpak mix. I know that I’ve had issues keeping conda and pip straight, so this is going to be a little challenging. But for now, everything on this list is working (with one exception, see the next graf). And best of all, it all worked pretty much just by installing with the aforementioned package managers. I’m impressed.

There’s a confusing partial-overlap between the UI settings managed by gnome-tweaks and those in the Pop!OS settings app. For example, to turn on the unix-standard readline keybindings for within-text navigation, and to fiddle with gnome-menu-extensions I had to use gnome-tweaks. Then it didn’t work until gnome-shell was rebooted some arbitrary and large number of times. But it did start working! Maybe I’m missing something in the settings app. All this said, the GUIs for settings are miles ahead of last time I played with desktop linux.

So far, nearly everything has worked almost without having to google a weird error message. The piece that doesn’t work yet is Scopy+M2K. For some reason, Scopy doesn’t see the M2K on the USB connection. The kernel sees the M2K, which I can tell by dmesg. I’ll figure this out. edit: after adding the ADALM2000 udev rules and a bunch of reboots, it just started working. Well, ok, then.

My initial impression is that the Meerkat is fantastic. It’s tiny, reasonably cheap, powerful as all heck. The software System76 has prepared is really first-rate. Well done, FLOSS vendor! So far I’m a v happy customer.

I got a ADALM2000 from digikey. It arrived quickly and without incident.

This device connects to a computer via USB and enables a lot of different measurements and kinds of signals. It doesn’t have a screen or controls, everything happens through the software on the laptop. I’ve been shopping for an arbitrary waveform generator, and this little box offers a pretty solid set of features for waveforms. In addition, it has a ton of other features, some of which I didn’t know about. It’s just arrived, so let’s take it for a spin.

First, I’m using this on MacOS 10.15.3, and the documentation says to install device drivers so the M2K is recognized by the operating system. The software they suggested gave errors when I tried to install it, but it turned out to be unnecessary anyway. I installed the control software, Scopy. And as all the best YouTubers say, let’s get started.

The device was incredibly easy to install and attach, so I’m going to skip that part. We forget about the stuff that Just Works. It’s a little annoying to have to figure out which of the many F dupont leads is the one I’m supposed to use for each feature, but I suspect I’ll just leave more useful leads in the appropriate connections.

The oscilloscope is the first tool. I attached it to my oscilloscope’s signal generator which emits a constant 1kHz square wave. And it looks exactly right. I didn’t play with the triggers, but the timebase and the volts/division were easy to set. Even easier was the autoset feature – it made a pretty good decision. I can imagine all the rest of the oscope stuff working pretty easily.

The network analyzer is another tool I’ve never used before. As far as I can make out, it’s basically a tool to test electronic filters. It generates a "stimulus" which it puts into the circuit. We measure the circuit at it’s input (going into the resistor) and its output (at the junction between the resistor and a capacitor). The resulting curve on the response channel shows how different frequencies are permitted or attenuated by the filter. The filter I put together (with a 1K resistor and a 2.2nF cap) starts attenuating at 1kHz and is strongest at 10MHz. Interesting.

I bought this thing for the waveform generation. I attached the W1 lead to my oscope’s lead, and GND to GND. I set it to a sine wave at 1kHz at 1v peak-to-peak, and it’s dead on. It’s also dead-on at 1MHz (shown), but it tops out at 30MHz, and at that speed, the signal is a tiny bit wobbly. To be fair, these are unshielded leads, and I think this speed is pushing my oscope’s ability to capture the signal reasonably, so I’m impressed.

The square wave is a little less stable. At 10MHz it’s a wobbly mess. However, by 1MHz, it looks square and stable. Similarly the triangle was wobbly at 10MHz but looks great below around 4MHz. In the image below, the sawtooth at 3MHz is a little wobbly.

There are the usual waveforms (sine, square, triangle, sawtooth) and options to input user-generated waves or output from math functions. This is exactly what I wanted. Just this is enough to make me pretty happy with this device.

The logic analyzer might for me be this device’s killer app. This is for figuring out whatever is going on in digital signals. I want to know.

I’ve been playing with some APA102 LEDs (Adafruit calls these DotStars) and a Teensy4. I write into the LEDs using the FastLED library. The protocol that the software on the Teensy uses to shove bytes down the wire is called SPI.

The wires that go to the LED strand go through a chip called a 74HCT245. This chip shifts the voltage from a barely readable-400mV to a stable 0/5v LOW/HIGH pattern. I’ve been curious if anything else happens in this chip, like say, a bunch of noise.

The logic analyzer lets me read the signals as they go through the line. Even more cool, it freakin’ decodes the signals so I can see what’s going on. In th eimage below, channels DIO1 and DIO3 measure the clock signal. Whenever the clock rises, the LED chips read the signal (HIGH or LOW) on the data line (which is measured on DIO0 and DIO2). Signals DIO0 and DIO1 are measured coming out of the Teensy, while DIO2 and DIO3 are measured coming out of the 74HCT245. This enables me to compare the two to see if they differ.

All this is happening one million times per second. Wow. This is a great tool.

The pattern generator creates digital patterns like the ones that the logic analyzer reads. In some sense, a signal generator is to an oscilloscope as a pattern generator is to a logic analyzer.

The digital IO is pretty easy to figure out: you can put a 5v signal on a channel, or measure one. Since there are 16 channels, that makes this a pretty convenient breadboard helper.

The voltmeter is interesting. First off, it’s helpful to have two channels. But be clear: this is a "voltmeter" in a sense similar to Adafruit’s fantastic ina260 measurement board. It’s delicate, will fry from reverse voltage, and has a very limited range. And it’s not all that accurate.

I connected the Adafruit LM4040 voltage reference board. I used the M2K voltmeter first on the high reference voltage. It should be 4.096v, but my Siglent SDM3055 says 4.103v (the Siglent is still within its calibration period). Meanwhile, the M2K thinks the voltage is somewhere between 4.055 and 4.162, a range of over 100mV. In this case, the truth does indeed lie in the middle, but that’s a wide range. Checking the low reference (nominally 2.048v), I see 2.0505v on the Siglent, but 2.007-2.078v on the M2K; it’s in range but has trouble figuring out where. I measured the voltage coming out of the power supply and found it to be a little high (5.044-5.142v): my antique but very reliable Fluke 45 says 5.005v.

The last tool on the M2K is a low-current power supply (good for up to 50mA). To use this, you have to attach a second USB cable. Ok. I measured both the positive and negative supplies over a 390K resistor. The power supply says it’s delivering 2.999v and the Siglent reports 2.999v; on the negative side, similarly the reported VDC is within 1 mV of what I’m measuring. Nice! It’s really helpful to have a negative power supply to prototype op-amps. For very low current applications, this is a great addition. I wonder if it has a fuse? Or short protection? (It’s an open source tool, so I could look up the schematics) I really needed another power supply, so this is a great addition to my bench.

Cons

What don’t I like? Well, the docs are horrible. There are basically no wiring examples (except for the network analyzer). Much of the documentation just narrates what I can see in the software without telling me how to set it up or why I should use it.

Possibly the more meaningful documentation is in what looks like a very impressive set of lab exercises that are a companion for the M2K. I’m looking forward to reading through it all.

The device feels cheap and crappy. The leads don’t fit smoothly into the housing. The dupont leads are definitely going to break or bend or otherwise become trash pretty quickly. I’m amazed that they didn’t print a sticker for the pinouts like their really useful internals diagram. I’ll be adding that.

And as I’ve mentioned, the voltmeter isn’t very good.

Pros

These minor issues aside, the M2K is a fantastic tool for my bench. The Scopy software is really good. The device has done exactly what I expected, and the software was a big help. I love that it’s open source hardware. I’m excited to log more stuff which this will make really easy. The ADALM2K + Scopy will complement my other bench instruments (power supply, multimeters, oscilloscope) by adding a few more channels and slightly easier logging. Adding the analyzers, generators, and digital IO, and we have a great package. I look forward to a lot more fun with this thing.