power supply and oscilloscope?

I am looking to purchase a bench top power supply and oscilloscope. I dont know much about these tools so I don't have a price range. Can anyone recommend types, brands and a possible price for low end, mid range and top of the line? Also, maybe let me know which brands to stay away from?

@Gordon I was also wondering if it would be possible to start another forum section about general electronics that don't generally fall under the "Espruino" category?

I am waiting for my new Rigol DS1054Z which I found after quite some research to be the best 'bang for the buck'. It's what eevblog recommends to (and general consensus on the forum over there too).

As for power supply, I have no idea. I'll follow this thread and hopefully someone has some good pointers.

I also like the 'general electronics' sub forum idea :)

Tada! Just done :)

For an oscilloscope, I bought an 'Owon pds6042s' for £199 a while back. It's just a very cheap Chinese make, but it's actually been pretty good (having said that the display on it is really bad - I notice it's not being sold any more so newer models might be better).

I wouldn't fall into the MHz trap - mine 'only' has 40Mhz bandwidth (not the same as samples per second, which is 250Mhz on mine) but I don't think I've ever needed to check anything anywhere near that quickly. Realistically the fastest output you'll ever really get from a microcontroller is 8Mhz, and for things like SPI you can usually slow that down if you want to debug it properly.

You might find that something hand-held like the DSO Quad is more than good enough - and it has the huge bonus of being small and battery powered. I found myself dragging mine outside to the car on more than one occasion!

I actually bought an HPS140 a while back (when it was on offer!) and while I think you'd want something with a better display and more channels, even that is surprisingly useful.

I wouldn't rule out oscilloscopes that you connect to the PC either. The Analog Discovery is pretty awesome (it has a logic analyser as well), and being connected to the PC means you can do things like save waveforms and even decode things like SPI.

With the bench power supply I can't really suggest anything - I just have a home-made one :) I wouldn't have thought you needed anything very expensive though, but I'd look at some reviews just to make sure the output is stable.

Similar to Analog Discovery, LabNation's SmartScope is Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS connectable USB scope with logic analyser and waveform generator. The software is evolving, next version will have protocol decoders too.