Watch This Awesome Oscilloscope ‘Breakout’ Game
A common lab instrument was repurposed for entertainment. Continue reading Watch This Awesome Oscilloscope ‘Breakout’ Game
Category Archives: oscilloscope
Programming an Oscilloscope Breakout Game in Pure Data
[S-ol] wrote in to share his sweet breakout game played on an oscilloscope. Built in a weekend as part of a game development jam, Plonat Atek is a polar breakout game where the player attacks the center and the ball bounces around the perimeter. You can play it either on an oscilloscope or using an online emulator. [S-ol] wrote the game in Pure Data, a visual programming language for audio. The software controls the audio out channels and uses sound to control the game graphics. He also made use of the Zexy extension for Pure Data.
One of the cool …read more
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Hybrid Interface Brings Touchscreen to Rigol Scope
With pervasive smartphones and tablets, the touch interface is assumed for small LCD screens, and we’ve likely all poked and pinched at some screen, only to find it immune to our gestures. Manufacturers have noticed this and begun adding touch interfaces to instruments like digital oscilloscopes, but touch interfaces tend to be an upgrade feature. But thanks to this hybrid oscilloscope touchscreen interface, even the low-end scopes can get in on the action.
It only makes sense that [Matt Heinz] started with one of the most hackable scopes for this build, which was his Master’s thesis project. Using an Android …read more
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Wireless Oscilloscope Review
[Martin Rowe] over at EDN recently put a $200 wireless oscilloscope to the test. The Areoscope 100A is a single channel scope in a probe body that communicates back to an Apple smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth LE. You can see the video from the post, below.
The original prototype of the device had a high bandwidth, but the production model only manages to have a 20 MHz bandwidth at 100 megasamples per second: nothing earth-shattering.
We aren’t above having a single channel scope to throw in a bag, but most of the ones we’ve looked at in the past …read more
Part Soldering Iron, Part Hand-Held Oscilloscope
If you are in the market for a temperature controlled soldering iron, an attractive choice of the moment is the TS-100 iron available by mail-order from China. This is an all-in-one iron with a digital temperature controller built into its handle, featuring a tiny OLED display. It’s lightweight, reasonable quality, and all its design and software are available and billed as open source (Though when we reviewed it we couldn’t find an open source licence accompanying the code.) This combination has resulted in it becoming a popular choice, and quite a few software hacks have appeared for it.
The latest …read more
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Playing Mario on an Oscilliscope
Any display can be connected to a microcontroller and used as a display if you know the protocol to use and have enough power in your micro. Sometimes, an odd display is used just “because it’s there.” This seems to be the case for Reddit user [phckopper], who has used a STM32 and a PS2 joystick to play a version of a Mario game on an oscilloscope.
There’s not many technical details but [phckopper] lets us know that the rendering is done using the SPI on the STM, transferred via DMA, which is synchronized to two saw-tooth waves that are …read more
Touchscreen Oscilloscope
[Marco Reps] didn’t want to lug a full-sized oscilloscope around to measure his ECG while running. He decided to check out the DSO112A which is a tiny touchscreen scope from the usual China sources. The tiny one channel scope can go to 2mV/division at 2MHz and can save and recall up to 24 configurations. It also has access to the data via a serial port so you can use it as a fancy data logger. [Marco’s] video appears below.
Apparently, there is was an older model without the A on the end that was not as sensitive and had some …read more
Dual Trace Scope 1939 Style
If you buy a serious scope these days, it is a good bet it will have at least two channels. There is a lot of value to being able to see two signals in relation to one another at one time. Even though the dual-trace oscilloscope goes back to 1938, they were uncommon and expensive for many years. [Mr. Carlson] found a device from 1939 that would turn a single channel scope into a dual trace scope. In 1939, that was quite the engineering feat.
Today, a dual trace scope is very likely to be digital. But some analog scopes …read more
Hackaday Prize Entry: Oscilloscope for the Masses
If you head down to your local electronics supply shop (the Internet), you can pick up a quality true-RMS multimeter for about $100 that will do almost everything you will ever need. It won’t be able to view waveforms, though; this is the realm of the oscilloscope. Unlike the multimeter’s realistic price point, however, a decent oscilloscope is easily many hundreds, and often thousands, of dollars. While this is prohibitively expensive for most, the next entry into the Hackaday Prize seeks to bring an inexpensive oscilloscope to the masses.
The multiScope is built by [Vítor] and is based on the …read more
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You Won’t Believe That Fidget Spinners Are Obvious Clickbait!
I don’t know why fidget spinners are only getting popular now. They’ve been selling like hotcakes on Tindie for a year now, and I’ve been seeing 3D printed versions around the Internet for almost as long. Nevertheless, fidget spinners — otherwise known as a device to turn a skateboard bearing into a toy — have become unbelievably popular in the last month or so. Whatever; I’m sure someone thinks my complete collection of Apollo 13 Pogs from Carl’s Jr. with modular Saturn V Pog carry case and aluminum slammer embossed with the real Apollo 13 mission patch is stupid …read more
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