Arduino Oscilloscope with Processing.

Hi Jordan!

If you're flexible on hardware, there is a simple analog signal viewer here that uses a Raspberry Pi and XMOS board, so still fairly cheap. It's not really an oscilloscope (none of these projects are) but perhaps good enough for viewing simple low-frequency signals.

There are a few other projects that do similar things. Click here for a PSoC board project with an LCD display. Alternatively there is a project using a TI board.

While those projects are good and all, they're not really what I'm looking for, though the last url was the closest idea I had. I'm thinking a small compact unit with just a few passives to make sure the Arduino can handle it. (example. resistors to bring down currents then in the sketch it would boost the current to match the actual current.) - Thank you for some examples though.

You really can't make much of a scope with an Arduino because the ADC is much too slow - for  a reasonable scope you need at least 100M samples per second per channel (even the really cheap Rigol and similar ones do this).  Even the fancy Arduinos based on ARMs can't cope.

To make a scope you need a decent front end (amplifier with adjustable gain), a fastish ADC and something to process the data (usually an FPGA or custom chip) - once you've put all that on a shield the Arduino isn't really bringing much the the party.

The Red Pitaya is a not bad effort to make a cheap single board scope from standard bits but it costs about £300 - you could buy  a Rigol or a Pico for the same money and it would work a whole lot better (but you couldn't reprogramme it yourself).

MK

I have to agree with @Michael Kellett, but how about a Raspberry Pi connected to a BitScope Micro for under $200?

Comments?

Clem

Yeah I guess that makes sense but it would still be cool lol

For under $200 you can get a small oscilloscope.

Still expensive in my opinion, but it's an oscilloscope nonetheless.

Example:

Portable Mini Nano Arm DSO201 Pocket Sized Handheld Digital Storage Oscilloscope | eBay

There is also the XprotoLab Portable which Ben featured in one of his episodes.

This one cost around $100

Thanks for some more info, but do you have the url for the xprotoLab portable

XprotoLab is $50 or so...

Thats Tiny Maaan! but explainable for the price.

That isn't a proper scope, the spec is very poor, only 1Ms/second - so the maximum frequency of signal you can reasonably look at is 100kHz. Even simple micro based devices like Arduinos have 16MHz clocks so you couldn't use it to work on them.

Far better buy a second hand scope (Ebay ?) for the same money.

The XprotoLab is faster sampling (but still only 2Ms/s but the display is tiny - I can't see it being much use.

MK