Electronic Projects for Oscilloscopes 2017

Electronic Projects for Oscilloscopes 2017 by Joseph Berardi The 2017 edition has embraced using a low-cost Arduino Uno board to make various oscilloscope projects. The book starts out with a tutorial on how one works and the different types of waveforms that can be observed. The next section of the [...]
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Electronic Projects for Oscilloscopes 2017 by Joseph Berardi The 2017 edition has embraced using a low-cost Arduino Uno board to make various oscilloscope projects. The book starts out with a tutorial on how one works and the different types of waveforms that can be observed. The next section of the book has an electronic reference that covers the fundamentals of passive electronic components. More sophisticated components are also presented with a comparison of different possible components useful in making the circuits for a digital oscilloscope. The 2017 edition added the Arduino Uno embedded controller. The low-cost Arduino embedded controller simplifies the amount of hardware required to build an oscilloscope. An embedded controller-based oscilloscope greatly enhances the capabilities and programmability of the oscilloscope. This book explores several different techniques for utilizing the less than twenty-five dollar Arduino Uno board and demonstrates how easy it is to make several different oscilloscope projects. The Oscilloscope 1 project demonstrates using the Uno board's built-in analog-to-digital converter with a few lines of code to create a primitive oscilloscope. There is no additional hardware required other than a Uno board connected to a PC. The Oscilloscope 3 project adds an external A/D converter onto a solderless breadboard for better performance. This project requires only one IC and a few resistors. No soldering is required, making this an excellent student's first building project. A simple sketch code listing is provided for using the IDE serial plotter for the oscilloscope display. A second more sophisticated sketch listing is used in conjunction with a PC computer using FreeBASIC code to make a standalone oscilloscope that does not require the Arduino environment. The FreeBASIC compiler is a modern programming language producing standalone EXE programs. As the name suggest, this full featured programming language is free to download and run. The Oscilloscope 6 project teaches a system engineering approach to adding peripherals to the Uno board for making more sophisticated electronic projects. The Oscilloscope 7 project adds a data memory to the A/D converter to greatly increase the sampling speed of the oscilloscope. A FIFO is used to make the sampling rate independent of the speed of the embedded controller. This final project, Oscilloscope 7, utilizes several other project boards resulting in a full featured oscilloscope capable of viewing small to large signals using a standard oscilloscope probe. This oscilloscope also supports using an external trigger signal which is crucial to capturing non-repetitive waveforms. The Oscilloscope 7 project can use the Uno generated clock for sampling or either of the two external clock generation boards. These separate boards allow sampling at a precise clock frequency or using an easily adjusted variable clock frequency oscillator for the conversion clock. After the basic hardware has been made, the project builder can incrementally develop the software features for the oscilloscope ending up with a very sophisticated piece of test equipment. This book contains the source code listings for both the sketch code running on the embedded controller and the FreeBASIC code running on the PC for demonstrating the capabilities of a full-feature oscilloscope. Along the way, the project builder will learn how to make and use clock generator circuits and analog amplifiers to add functionality to the oscilloscope. The book culminates with a demonstration FreeBASIC code listing for a GUI (graphical user interface) dashboard and a separate graphical plot program for plotting waveforms from saved data files. The user can save waveform files and plot the data later for further study. Joseph Berardi is a retired electronics engineer with twenty-four years experience in development engineering.