Youscope (oscilloscope demo)

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By Phillip Torrone
Posted 2007/08/29 @ 11:00 am
Category Art & Design, Electronics, Music

Miikka writes -

It’s bit late and off-topic, but anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet… here is a cool use for your oscilloscope: use it as a display for a demo. This demo won the third place in Assembly Summer ’07 shortfilm competition. I really like those sine waves. By the way, the guy who made this is 15 years old. The oscilloscope is connected to PC soundcard and is in X/Y-mode, with right channel connected to X and left to Y input. Download its waveform from here to see it on your oscilloscope!

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9 Responses to Youscope (oscilloscope demo)

p914 on August 29th, 2007 at 1:30 pm said:

That is amazing!! I wonder if he had to modify the soundcard to output DC or extend the frequency range. I’m blown away.

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BanjoPlayer on August 30th, 2007 at 5:59 am said:

The young man who made this should make McGyver retire. It’s always such a pleasure seeing things appropriated for innovative new uses which bear absolutely no relation to their original purpose.

To make the tools do more and different tihngs than what they were designed for.

Last one to run Doom on oscilloscope is a rotten egg!

–

The Banjo Players Must Die

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galsup on August 31st, 2007 at 2:03 pm said:

Nice job! I’m guessing we’ll see web servers and browsers in oscilloscopes very soon. Here’s a site that has a lot of oscilloscope demonstration videos. Series 6000 Oscilloscope Demos There are several general applications. They’re somewhat commercial, but entertaining none the less.

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westfw on September 7th, 2007 at 8:12 am said:

neat! How’d he do the pixel-like effects without any intensity modulation?

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W Sanders on December 29th, 2007 at 7:47 pm said:

You can draw without intensity modulation by just moving the dot many times faster between draws and then slowing it down where you want to see a vector.

You don’t need a huge amount of bandwidth, but you need to be able to slew the signal fairly fast. The Dutchtronix AVR Oscilloscope Clock, which uses an AVR CPU and an external DAC, draws the hands about 400 frames per sec (abt 2.4 msec per frame), although there seems to be some “interlacing” of the more static parts of the image like the clock face and numbers. It works fine without intensity mod.

You would only need to be able to swing the output from zero to maximum in 100 usec or so, I think most sound cards and some controllers could do that, certainly with the help of an external DAC.

What impresses me is how the heck he built the flac file. Nice job!

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W Sanders on December 29th, 2007 at 7:54 pm said:

After listening to the audio file (my dumpster-dived cheap-ass scope doesn’t have an X-axis amp so I can’t “view” it ) it almost sounds like you could “rasterize” just about any arbitrary image and translate it into an X-Y scope image.

The slower you move the dot, the brighter the image. It would not be too hard to write software to do that if you had an easy to use soundcard library.

Now, there’s a heckuva homework assignment!

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a6l3i on January 25th, 2012 at 3:11 am said:

Thanks for your cool post.
I want to try this on my laptop (haven’t oscilloscope).
1- Do you know any free oscilloscope software that feeds from microphone and be able to show this demo?
2- Can i play “youscope-wave” by laptop and connect the output to its microphone to feed mentioned oscilloscope?

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Tommy on May 17th, 2012 at 8:16 pm said:

Please supply me some information on how to set up oscilloscope connection as to show
AC and DC current in electrical class demonstration.

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eddie dean on August 16th, 2012 at 1:23 pm said:

couldnt you just use the “balance” and volume knobs as x-y amplifiers? also, what happens if you switched left and right ? (i remember some dude showing the demo “flipped”,complaining his scope didnt have the “switch” to put it right.

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