Teaching laboratories are shared, oversubscribed, and open only during scheduled hours. A student who needs an oscilloscope at the moment the work demands one frequently cannot get to a bench.

Buying a personal instrument solves access, and it means paying for a screen, a processor and a battery that duplicate the computer already on the desk.

The instrument performs a single function to a high standard: accurate signal acquisition. Everything else runs in a browser on the computer already in front of you.

1. Connect. Over USB or over WiFi. Nothing is installed.
2. Acquire. The hardware samples the signal and streams it out.
3. Work. Display, measurement, FFT, mathematics and storage all run in the browser.

Removing the screen, the processor and the battery removes most of what a bench instrument costs to build.

Because the measurement session is held on a server rather than on a device screen, someone else can open it from another location. They can watch the readings live, or take control of the interface and set up a capture the first person cannot configure alone.

An instrument with its own screen cannot do this. The screen is where the measurement lives, and only one person can stand in front of it.

A laboratory bench wherever the work happens, and someone to work it through with, wherever they are.

The M1 is a prototype. A Raspberry Pi Pico currently serves live readings to a browser page. The acquisition front end is being brought up, and the analogue chain has been simulated but not yet built.

We are targeting up to 1 MHz of analogue bandwidth across two channels. That is a target rather than a measured result, and it will be revised in public if the hardware says otherwise.

There is no price, no release date, and nothing to buy. The waitlist is how we will tell you when that changes.

Leave an address and we will email you once, when the instrument is available. Not a newsletter, not an update list. One message.

Telling us what you do is optional, and it helps us understand who this is useful to.

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I would like Mikronome to email me once, when the instrument is available. I understand my address will not be used for anything else and that I can remove it at any time.

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One email, when it is ready. What we do with your address.

Mikronome is being built by four Electrical and Information Engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, as a venture inside the ELEN3018A Economics of Design course.

We are not an oscilloscope company. The oscilloscope is the first instrument. The same approach, moving the display and the processing into a browser, applies to function generators, logic analysers, data acquisition units and power supplies.