Autonerdz forums

I just purchased a picoscope and note the verticle resolution is listed in bits.  What is a bit when used in this context and how is this relevant to automobile diagnostics?

'Bit' is not just an oscilloscope term, it refers to an amount of electronic data and is a standard term.

Bill

In computer speak a single bit is an actual piece of hardware that has two possible values 0 and1.

Every time you add another bit you double the number of possible values.

in binary 0=0, 1=1, 10=2, 11=3; that is four possible values in two bits.
100=4, 101=5, 110=6, 111=7; three bit adds four more possible values for 8 total

11111111=255 so when we include 0, eight bits has 256 possible values (there are 256 combinations of 1's and 0's in eight bits)

So eight bits is like a ruler with 255 marks on it (we don't have a mark at 0)
Ten bits would be the same ruler with 1023 marks for 1024 measurements
and Twelve bits puts 4095 marks for 4096 possible measurements.

32 bits has 4294967295 and 64 bits has 18446744073709551615

What is a bit when used in this context

So I have no idea why they don't just give us numbers that we can understand

and how is this relevant to automobile diagnostics?

back to the eight bit ruler with 256 measurements.
Half the range is above 0 and half below
so When the scale is set from 0 to +/- 500mv there are only 128 steps from 0 to +500mv or about one every .004mv

The big difference is when you zoom in on the wave form it looks like steps; the higher resolution has a whole bunch of little ones, low resolution fewer and bigger.

Jim

I remember learning that digital meant that any integer used by a computer was going to be either a one or a zero because it was not possible to create hardware that contained all the individual integers. Hence the use of ones and zeros to address any integer in the numerical system.