This Arduino Oscilloscope project is a great idea. For people that are getting into electronics having a meter is good but having a scope is great. With this project you can take your $30 Arduino board and turn it into a oscilloscope, it won’t show you great detail or very fast circuits but often times that is not needed.
"This software allows you to get a visual representation of an analog signal using Arduino and Processing. The resolution is 10 bits so this is not like a real oscilloscope but it is still pretty useful. It works by sending values read from the Arduino board (pin 0) to Processing through serial communication."
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10 bits is actually better than most commercial DSOs which are usually 8 bits. Unfortunately the low sampling frequency, which looks really low (a few hundred of samples per second, could maybe be pushed to 10kHz if well optimized) make it inadequate for any kind of “real” oscilloscope work. I guess it’s a fun project to make at least once for the learning factor or for a longer term application like data logging.
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When this project was at very early state (like in first picture) I tried this and modified the code to cat like “real” oscilloscope (sweep from left to right with adjustable rate, scaling, triggering etc). It was very useful, because I didn’t have oscilloscope at time… Didn’t even have multimeter with true-rms measuring, so this was very good for measuring ripple voltage at power supplies etc.
Might try to modify this again to have simple oscilloscope with storage etc…
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I am more interested in the software than the hardware. If it was a simple enough format, I could get a more powerful microcontroller and increase the sampling rate significantly.
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I wrote the software.
You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/arduinoscope/source/browse/#svn/trunk
It’s very simple. Use processing to look at it.
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Thanks for providing the code link.