Table of contents

Abstract

Happy Holiday blog using road test instruments

Project

Intro

cstanton  challenged us to make a holiday blog using road test instrumentation, so I worked out a scheme to use 3 instruments that I have road tested. Actually I am still testing the Digilent AD3.

The Concept

The idea is to use arbitrary waveform generators to display a holiday message on an oscilloscope screen.

This effort will use two dual channel arbitrary waveform instruments feeding a four-channel oscilloscope.

The waveform generators are a Multicomp MP750511 and a Digilent Analog Discovery 3. The oscilloscope is a Rhode & Schwarz RTB2004.

The reason four channels are needed is that letters that have three horizontal sections need a separate channels to display each section and I wanted the numbers to have a separate color, making four channels.

The Result

Discussion

The first image is produced just using the Digilent AD3 which can generate 2 arbitrary waveforms and display them on its 2 scope channels.

The second image shows all four waveform generators being displayed on  the RTB2004 scope.

These types of image were inspired by some work by misaz ...

I did not have a great way to synchronize the 2 waveform generator instruments yet, so the image is manually triggered when the traces are in the correct phase.

The scope can change the color of each channel, but it does not have a wide selection of colors.

Here is an example:

The Digilent scope has full control over colors so here is what it can do to get close to proper colors on the logo:

Unfortunately, it doesn't have enough channels to color everything properly or fully form the letters, but I like the display and its flexibility. We will just have to wait for Digilent to make a 4 channel version of the Analog Discovery. It could very appropriately be called the AD4 

It is a lot of fun to play around with these instruments - making them do things that aren't really their strong suit. It doesn't have to be a monster project to be fun.

I hope you all can find interesting ways to have fun this holiday season....

The four csv files needed to create the scope display are included here in a .zip file.

Attachments

References

Holiday Special 2023

Multicomp Pro MP750511 Road Test

Rhode & Schwarz RTB2004 Road Test

Digilent Analog Discovery 3 preliminary road test blog

My other Holiday Project - Space Invaders