Do you remember “What color is your function?” blog post, quite popular a few years ago? If you don’t know it, read it now, it’s definitely worth it (and also quite entertaining).

Some time ago, while looking to for a way to mix gevent with a blocking API of an extension module written in C (and thus impossible to be tweaked with monkey patching ), I’ve came across a very interesting code snippet from Mike “zzzeek” Bayer , author of SQLAlchemy (and a few other well-known projects). This code shows a very clever way of mixing functions of different colors (that is, asynchronous and synchronous code).

Let’s take a closer look.

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The Rohde & Schwarz HMO1202 oscilloscope is one of my favorite workbench tools (it’s actually a rebranded oscilloscope from Hameg. R&S acquired Hameg in 2005). This scope is out of production already (I bought it in 2016), and it’s not nearly as cool as all the new fancy scopes with large touchscreens and other cool features, but it serves me well, and I can’t justify buying a new one. It replaced my old Tektronix TDS2012B, which was really showing its age - desperately low screen resolution (QVGA, i.e., 320x240), only 2.5K samples memory, no intensity mode (a.k.a. “digital phosphor”), to name just a few annoyances. Switching to the HMO1202 was a giant leap.

However, there is one thing that I regret - HMO1202 includes an 8-channel logic analyzer that I can’t use. It requires the HO3508 logic pod, which was ridiculously expensive back then and is out of production now as well. But how difficult would it be to design a simple, compatible logic pod?

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