1. 16khz? You're better off using your sound card.

Posted at 12:08AM on Dec 28th 2006 by SuperJdynamite

2. to #1, its a scope, not a wave generator

Posted at 8:58AM on Dec 28th 2006 by wolf

3. The random track angles on the PCB makes me cringe!

Lol superjd. Quite true but its a nice little design nonetheless.

Posted at 9:16AM on Dec 28th 2006 by timb

4. Yes there are plenty of programs to use your sound card as a scope. I doubt you would be very willing to use it for anything other than low level signal though.

http://www.zelscope.com/

Unless your computer is not worth anything to you?
Jason Rollette

Posted at 10:37AM on Dec 28th 2006 by Jason Rollette

5. Well a computer sound card can take a 1v p-p signal, this can take a 5v p-p signal, so a simple resistive divider would bring a sound card up to the same range as this... I would use a 100k/20k divider, with a pair of little signal diodes in antiparalel across the input to cap the voltage at about a volt (all of this on the computer side of the dc blocking cap) Add a program like zelscope and viola, digital scope.

The only problem I have with using a sound card is that it is ac-coupled at a pretty high frequiency, so it is hard to watch slow moving waveforms. This in combination with the slow sample rate really limits the overall usefulness of the scope to to audio range, and slow serial comunications. But this scope doesn't solve that either.

So really the only advantage to this scope over a computer would be that it is smaller/more portable.

I think that the project would be more useful as a way to display info on a tv, that is a pretty impressive hack IMHO

Posted at 11:31AM on Dec 28th 2006 by ...

6. @SuperJdynamite:
Not entirely true. What if you require several working places (e.g. a student's lab) to have a scope each and have no money? The costs for this baby are close to nil and an old tv-set can be found in everybodys attic for free.
If you look at http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/land/PROJECTS/ you'll see lot's of interesting stuff abt. neurobiology and there you don't have to deal with frequencies above 2 kHz AFAIK.

Posted at 12:42PM on Dec 28th 2006 by Hans von Montavis

7. The video output aspect of it is used by a lot of cornell EE students in their microcontroller course. I think the course notes discuss creating and synching a video signal. I ran across this site when googling for homebuild usb ir signal detectors (remote control readers)

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/

Posted at 12:55PM on Dec 28th 2006 by mike

8. I guess that answers my question. I asked a month or so ago if you could use a standard CRT (though I was thinking of interfacing with the deflection plates directly) as a basic oscilloscope.

Posted at 1:25PM on Dec 28th 2006 by TJ

9. here's a very easy to build buffer to hook up oscope probes to your sound card. it was designed with xoscope for linux in mind, but it will work with any soundcard scope software, afaik. http://xoscope.sourceforge.net/hardware/hardware.html

Posted at 1:50PM on Dec 28th 2006 by dioxide

10. #9 beat me to the xoscope buffer circuit suggestion, but as I just built the circuit and was playing with it (and xoscope) over the weekend I felt as though I had a couple of things to add. I used a simple 555 timer based circuit to out a square wave at various frequencies. I found that in order to see a wave form that actually resembled a square wave I was limited to the 3.5kHz -4kHz range. If you are just interested in the spectrum (like doing a FFT or something) you could go up to about 20kHz or so. (Note the sample rate was set at 44.1kHz). Just a little added info that I thought ya'll might be interested in.

Posted at 3:02PM on Dec 28th 2006 by troycurtisjr

11. Regarding the buffer circuit for xoscope..

http://xoscope.sourceforge.net/hardware/hardware.html

.I dont understand what voltage is being used to power the opamp? Looking at the schematics the +12v and -12v is going thru diodes and then into the non inverting input and nowhere in the schematic does it show the voltage to power the opamp which would be pins 8 and 4. If anyone has sucessfully built this circuit please email me at zane7001@yahoo.com.

see tl082 site http://www.national.com/images/pf/TL082/00835703.pdf

thanks

Neal

Posted at 9:31PM on Jan 23rd 2007 by zane

12. Do anyone here know how to connect ATmega32 with computer?? How is that Atmega32 can be interfaced with Computer??

Posted at 7:21AM on Mar 18th 2007 by tillzenith

13. do anyone know how to interface ATmega32 with the Computer? How to communicate atmega32 and a computer??

Posted at 6:21AM on Apr 3rd 2007 by tillzenith

14. @ #11/neal/zane

The reason that the power connections to the op-amp are not shown is that they are assumed to be connected. Since there's little reason for building a circuit and not powering the chips, power connections are frequently taken as implied rather than drawn in.

Posted at 3:30PM on Jul 10th 2007 by abend