Category Archives: tektronix

Incredibly Heavy Ornament Likely Inappropriate To Hang On Tree

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It’s that time of year again, and the Christmas hacks are flooding in thick and fast. To get into the Christmas spirit,  the FoxGuard team wanted a custom ornament to hang from the tree. They may have gotten more than they bargained for.

It’s a simple build that demonstrates the basic techniques of working with DACs and scopes in a charming holiday fashion. A Tektronix T932A analog oscilloscope is pressed into service as a display, by operating in XY mode. A Teensy 3.5 was then chosen for its onboard digital to analog converters, and used to output signals to draw …read more

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The Guts Of Switched Mode Power Supplies, Brought To You By Oscilloscope Repair

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The Tektronix 2000 series of oscilloscopes are a mainstay for any electronics lab. They work, they’re relatively cheap, they’re good, and they’re available in just about any surplus electronics store. [Mr.RC-Cam] has been hoarding one of these for twenty years, and like any classic piece of equipment, it needs a little refurbishment every now and again. Now, it’s time. Here’s how you repair one of the best values in analog oscilloscopes.

This repair adventure began when the scope died. There were no lights, no screen trace, and a brief hiss sound when it was powered on. (Ten points if you …read more

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A Christmas Tree for your Lab

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It seems like holiday decorations come up earlier and earlier every year. You might not have room for a full-blown tree in your lab, but if you have an arbitrary waveform generator and a scope, Tektronix has a way for you to show your spirit electronically.

You can see the video below. Naturally, it features Tektronix gear, but we are pretty sure you could make it work with any arbitrary waveform generator that has at least two channels and a scope with an XY mode.

The key to making this easy isn’t a Tektronix app. It is WebPlotDigitizer, a web …read more

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A Christmas Tree for your Lab

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It seems like holiday decorations come up earlier and earlier every year. You might not have room for a full-blown tree in your lab, but if you have an arbitrary waveform generator and a scope, Tektronix has a way for you to show your spirit electronically.

You can see the video below. Naturally, it features Tektronix gear, but we are pretty sure you could make it work with any arbitrary waveform generator that has at least two channels and a scope with an XY mode.

The key to making this easy isn’t a Tektronix app. It is WebPlotDigitizer, a web …read more

Continue reading A Christmas Tree for your Lab→

Keep Both Hands on the Probes With This Oscilloscope Footswitch

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We’ve got two hands, so it’s natural to want to use both of them while diagnosing a circuit with an oscilloscope. Trouble is, keeping both hands on the probes makes it a touch difficult to manipulate the scope. If only there were some way to put your idle lower appendages to work.

This multipurpose oscilloscope footswitch interface makes so much sense that we wonder why such a thing isn’t standard equipment on more scopes. [Paul Roukema]’s interface relies on the USB Test and Measurement Class (USBTMC) protocol that allows most modern scopes to be remotely controlled, somewhat like the General …read more

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Keep Both Hands on the Probes With This Oscilloscope Footswitch

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We’ve got two hands, so it’s natural to want to use both of them while diagnosing a circuit with an oscilloscope. Trouble is, keeping both hands on the probes makes it a touch difficult to manipulate the scope. If only there were some way to put your idle lower appendages to work.

This multipurpose oscilloscope footswitch interface makes so much sense that we wonder why such a thing isn’t standard equipment on more scopes. [Paul Roukema]’s interface relies on the USB Test and Measurement Class (USBTMC) protocol that allows most modern scopes to be remotely controlled, somewhat like the General …read more

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A Oscilloscope For The Nuclear Age

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Here at Hackaday, we’re suckers for vintage instruments. More than one of our staffers has a bench adorned with devices spanning many decades, and there’s nothing more we like reading about that excursions into the more interesting or unusual examples. So when a Tweet comes our way talking about a very special oscilloscope, of course we have to take a look! The Tektronix 519 from 1962 has a 1GHz bandwidth, and [Timothy Koeth] has two of them in his collection. His description may be a year or two old, but this is the kind of device for which the up-to-the-minute …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Circuit Boards The Tektronix Way

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Printed circuit boards are a fundamental part of both of commercial electronic equipment and of the projects we feature here on Hackaday. Many of us have made our own, whether done so from first principles with a tank of etchant, or sent off as a set of Gerbers to a PCB fab house.

To say that the subject of today’s Retrotechtacular is the manufacture of printed circuit boards might seem odd, because there is nothing archaic about a PCB, they’re very much still with us. But the film below the break is a fascinating look at the process from two …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Circuit Boards The Tektronix Way

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Printed circuit boards are a fundamental part of both of commercial electronic equipment and of the projects we feature here on Hackaday. Many of us have made our own, whether done so from first principles with a tank of etchant, or sent off as a set of Gerbers to a PCB fab house.

To say that the subject of today’s Retrotechtacular is the manufacture of printed circuit boards might seem odd, because there is nothing archaic about a PCB, they’re very much still with us. But the film below the break is a fascinating look at the process from two …read more

Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Circuit Boards The Tektronix Way→

Decimal Oscilloclock harks back to 1927 movie

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Metropolis is a classic, silent film produced in 1927 and was one of the very first full length feature films of the science fiction genre, and very influential. (C-3PO was inspired by Maria, the “Machine human” in Metropolis.) Within the first couple of minutes in the film, we get to see two clocks — one with a 24-hour dial and another larger one with a 10-hour dial. The human overlords of Metropolis lived a utopian 24 hour day, while the worker scum who were forced to live and work underground, were subjected to work in two ten-hour shifts during the …read more

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