Suggestions for PC Oscilloscope

There are some that use your sound capture card

some

software.

could

Hi,

Some older non PC computers have A/D built into joystick ports or sound capture ports. The Acorn BBC and Amiga computers I think. You could look at getting an old one cheap. They can be programmed in basic for the graphics etc.

Or just buy a used audio scope. 10Mhz 1 Channel.

Geoff

much

at

It's not just older, non PC computers, the typical "standard" joystick port found on most if not all PCs is analog, then A/D converted. However the range might be poor enough to make the resulting readings too inaccurate? Here's an application to do it with the sound "card" analog audio input instead:

Dave

An old, old issue of Probe magazine (perhaps 1990 or so) had plans for an o-scope circuit that fed the parallel port, including the matching software. It could be easily modified to do what you need. Perhaps a library would have these magazines on microfilm.

Whereas On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 09:47:58 +0100, "Geoff Hackett" scribbled: , I thus relpy:

For most A/D joystick type ports, the are mostly an R/C pulse generator, with the R component supplied by the pot in the joystick. Hardware or software would time the width of the pulse, and report that to the user program.

I was also looking for PC-based oscilloscope, one such is available at

Also have a look at

Animesh Maurya

The resulted treading from the PC joystick port is quite inaccurate. The A/D converter system used in PC joystick hardware is very simple. It is basically a one-shot multivibrator that is triggered by software, and then software loop counts the pulse length. This system is not particularly accurate (variation between different ports, between differenc changes, PC temperture has it's effects), the software measurin has it's limits (in practice less than 8 bits of resolution) and the measuring is slow for most oscilloscope applications (conversion time can be up to 2 milliseconds, typically around 1 ms, so sample rate can't be higher than 1 kHz, usually less than this).

You can find circuit to convert voltage to signal that can be connected to PC joystick port input with the plans presented at

This is a worth to check option if the soundcard performance is enough (limited only to AC measurements at audio frequencies).

Some links to PC scope projects can be found at

I seems to me that there is software available to use Sound Cards as an A/D interface for a PC scope. Why re-invent the wheel ! when all you really want is a place sit and think !

Yukio YANO

Anybody have a scope program/attachment for a Mac?