Half a century ago, telephones featured rotary dials and were tethered to landlines. Those phones eventually evolved to phones having buttons and a simple caller ID digital display. Today’s telephones are wireless with touchscreen technology.

Beautiful and intuitive visual displays and touchscreen technology have integrated with phones and other gadgets we use in our everyday lives, including cars, home security systems, and refrigerators. Why is it not odd that engineers and scientists on the cutting edge of research and development still find themselves stuck using large, bulky electrical measurement tools like oscilloscopes, lock-in amplifiers, and function generators with analog displays, a clutter of hard buttons, and inexact knobs? It is as though evolution of electrical lab equipment got stuck somewhere between the rotary phone and the caller ID phase.

It is for this reason that we at Flash are excited about the Moku:Lab by Liquid Instruments. Moku:Lab brings the experience of operating an instrument and collecting data into the 21st century. The software provides an intuitive user interface with gesture-based controls that works with the iPad®. Data can be easily read on the screen, downloaded, and shared wirelessly to many popular cloud services.

Liquid Instruments iPad

Moku:Lab is built on a fast FPGA architecture and is programmed with eleven popular high-speed instruments with more to come. It is the perfect investment for any laboratory needing a plethora of instruments or for teaching labs that need multiple functions in their experiments throughout the semester. The Moku:Lab can function as an:

  1. Oscilloscope
  2. Function Generator
  3. Lock-in Amplifier
  4. PID Controller
  5. Bode Analyzer
  6. Phase Meter
  7. Spectrum Analyzer
  8. Digital Filter Box
  9. Data Logger
  10. FIR Filter Builder
  11. Arbitrary Waveform Generator

Knowing that each individual instrument with comparable capability to the Moku:Lab costs $1000 to $5000, the value of the Moku:Lab becomes clear. At $4990 USD, it is eleven instruments for the price of one or two.

Finally, replacing the eleven instruments with the Moku:Lab can help remove clutter in your lab. Instead of two, three, four, or more instruments, now you only need one. The benchtop can now be dedicated to the experiment, rather than to the supporting measurement systems.

If you’d like to learn more about Moku:Lab, check out our website or contact us today.


iPad® is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.