Verifying the timing between relay activations

Question

I would like to verify timings of a relay controlled by an arduino (uno R3). There is a lot going on in the sketch and it does not use the delay function but one which is based on counting milliseconds. The arduino then transmits to another arduino using a radio module (nRF24L01). I'd like to confirm the intervals between the relay, so for instance if the relay is acivated 10 times and there are 5 seconds between each actvation.

So what I was wondering was whether anyone had any reccomendations on methods to verify timings using an external source.

Two ideas I came up with were: have another arduino with a very simple script that measures the timings or try and find/write a verilog script to upload to a mojo fpga and measures the timings.

An ideal situation would be where I have a seperate device that hooks up to the relay and then measures and displays the timings between the relay switches and is extremely precise.

I hope that makes sense, if not please let me know and I'll explain further. Thank you for reading and any help is greatly appriciated.

Answer 1

You could use sigrok with one of the many supported devices. For example, you can find on ebay an 8 channell 24MHz probe for less than $10.

It's a nice tool to have laying around. For example you can use it as less-invasive-than-serial-print way to detect when internal states of a program change value: just toggle some unused GPIO.