Purpose of the oscilloscope

Many use it depending on the problem being solved. A common use would be to debug i2c, spi, mdio and other serial buses and their protocols. These interfaces allow for some creativity from the process engineers, with the result that the software has to make sure it sends the correct bits in the correct order at the correct speed, for bidirectional lines turning the bus at the right time so that the other side can be controlled, etc. ... All this can be seen in the area. You can find out if the reason something is not working is because of your code or because of the hardware, or because of some information that was not correctly passed between the parties, such as the correct i2c address.

Another not very unusual use for debugging, for example I actually get into the interrupt service routine. Add a line to turn the gpio bit, look for that bit in scope, maybe see the time between that bit and the external event that caused it (assuming it was an external event). Maybe determine that you might have a latency issue, maybe you need a build to speed up the reaction time, such a thing.

Getting an area yourself before even knowing what you're going to do with it may not be entirely correct. It depends on where you are in this process of moving into this world. If you are in an independent contractor, for sure at some point, if you work for someone, they must already have this equipment if they want to be or remain successful in this business. At the same time, too often, the right equipment is not available to engineers and you have to get creative with your job, so an important lesson is learned without the right equipment. Perhaps the gpio example above is a workaround for not having the hardware or software / development environment, etc. that you wanted / needed to work with.

There are always some errors or missing information in technical descriptions and user manuals. More often than not, the split by 2 in the clock tree is not well documented and you cannot figure out why your serial port is not working. go out of scope, measure the time on the signal, maybe change the code to make it a different baud rate, see how this changes the signal in scope, figure out if you are off by 2 or 4 (usually in the case), etc. Knowing the answer to the resulting clock speed can lead to the fact that ah-ha-ha is what the management tried to describe or which one of the pictures shows, but is not mentioned anywhere in the text. One of the tutorials I recently used was that the text said that this clock is divisible by two for each, but one image,only one mentioned timers is clock 2 clock, not effectively split. By experimenting, I realized what the reality was. If you run away and write many thousands of lines of tutorial-based code without experimenting with real hardware that you use for weeks or months of debugging. Volume helps, at least in part.

The short answer is that with a desktop or laptop or phone or other smart device, you have a user interface, keyboard, mouse, display, touchscreen, etc. In the built-in you sometimes have a serial port and some LEDs are blinking but often not, and for the serial port to work, you need to get a boot that occupies an area, if there are problems, debug the flash memory, make sure the data is there with the correct orientation and etc. Then debug the serial number of the port clock if there is no manual for the device. an oscilloscope is your monitor or display for embedded programs. for example lcd panel or computer monitor is writing gui applications.