turn your expensive oscilloscope into a $5 clock

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Neat.

Could one make the 4th "unused" voltage level something out of range of the display, so that the extra lines are not visible?

Mark

Our expensive scopes already have time-of-day clocks.

John

Some guys actually did some similar using a PC soundcard. They made a 'demo' similar to the ones often found for home computers like Commodore 64, Amiga, MSX and so on.

Can't you just tie a long rope on the oscilloscope and make a pendulum out of it?

On a sunny day (Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:26:49 -0700) it happened Don Lancaster wrote in :

No need for that, it orbits the sun once a year, all by itself.

Maybe I can get it to sweep exactly once per day.

John

Good idea. That requires a display module, and a sensor to detect the passage of the scope. You also need some sort of power to overcome the frictional etc. losses in the pendulum. I suspect the PIC coding will be more complex. It will probably also need an accurate oscillator to detect heat, atmospheric etc. influence on the pendulum and to apply corrections.

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For you next project, build a device that will accept a string of characters and convert them to a voltage function of time, as in the logo for the Plessey Company:

-- Joe

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Here's my company logo, as a vector display and an x-y analog scope:

John

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Hmm, Curious how you got the black out lines around the image? is this a color scope?

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Some scopes have a Z-axis intensity/blanking input which could probably be used for that.

Dave.

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Hi, did you do that with photoshop ;-)???? I can do it with gimp LOL. Anyways,I decided to take your challenge, and played this Sunday afternoon:

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It is clever, but why not go TV? I could make a movie of my digital clock.....

There is one thing that I didn't understand: are you guys have terribly nothing to do?

If you show a TV picture using an oscilloscope, could it be a way around the TV tax in some countries?

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Have you never created designs just for the joy of doing so?

I suspect it is the signal received that is taxed rather than the receiver.

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The entire image needs to move slowly around on the screen randomly to prevent screen burn-in.

Dave.

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Can you go the other way and turn a $5 clock into a scope!

Hardy

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Many years ago I was the test equipment repair technician at Perkin Elmer Wangco division, which had several hundred Tektronix 465B scopes. We had this one scope that had a hard-to-find problem in the trigger circuit. Using that scope, I ran a test: I removed the bezel, put the scope in x-y mode with inputs grounded (thus creating a single dot that doesn't move), placed the dot in a corner of the screen that the bezel normally covered, turned the intensity all the way up, and left it that way for six months. No burn in visible. No spot visible when turned off, no change in intensity when bright or dim traces crossed the spot.

That particular lab required walking to the back wall in the dark to reach the light switches. That 465B put out just enough light to stop from tripping over things. You could say that I turned an expensive oscilloscope into a $3 night-light... :)

Nope; at least, not in the UK. If you receive a TV broadcast (whether by radio, cable, internet[1], etc), you are required to pay the licence fee.

If you have a normal TV set, but only ever use it for watching DVDs (or as a monitor for CCTV or an old home microcomputer), you don't need a licence. OTOH, if you record broadcasts with a VCR, but don't actually have a TV, you still need a licence.