An electronic oscilloscope is an indispensable thing in production, in a home or educational laboratory. This measuring device allows you to look into the operation of electronic circuits, showing on the screen the dynamics of changes in the input potential. It is indispensable when setting up powerful thyristor converters in production. Good for troubleshooting electrical control, protection or process control circuits, significantly reducing equipment downtime.
Assembling an oscilloscope with your own hands is a difficult task for a radio amateur, but only if you follow the traditional path, trying to simulate the operation of modern measuring instruments. We are talking about analog and digital devices that are produced on an industrial scale.
The picture changes radically if a household personal computer is used as a computing node and visual control over the measured voltage. High-speed modern processors can solve any problems, and a large monitor for monitoring the measured signal will only be a plus. It remains only to collect a smallcircuit, and you will make an oscilloscope with your own hands. The device does not require pre-adjustment.
Let's look at the main parts of the product. You can easily find the circuit itself and the program for flashing the controller in specialized literature. As a rule, the device has one or more analog inputs. By installing an adjustable divider on one of them, you can change the amplitude of the input signal. This is done to expand the measurement range of the device. As protection against exceeding the permissible voltage, we install a parametric stabilizer or any other device that limits the input voltage level. That's it, you can connect the analog inputs to the input of the microprocessor, the outputs of which are connected to the connector for connecting the device to the USB port. The circuit is powered using the same port.
Thus, we made our own oscilloscope with our own hands, but to start the device, you need to program the microcontroller and install an interface program for recognizing input signals on your computer. The controller is programmed using a programmer and installed on the board. We also install the necessary program on the computer. As you may have guessed, you made your own usb oscilloscope. The main requirement is that all installation and programming operations must be performed correctly.
As you can see, it is not difficult to make a digital oscilloscope with your own hands. The speed of this device allows you to configure,repair or study the principle of operation of simple electronic circuits. Such a device is useful in the home laboratory.
To increase the speed of the device, several methods are used, but they all lead to the complication of the original circuit. You can use the parallel port to connect the device to a computer, this will bypass the sampling rate of the USB port and increase performance.
In addition, there are special boards that are inserted into the computer and are used to process input signals.
