Turn
your PC into a free oscilloscope
with
ADC0820 connected to the printer parallel port

Hardware

Software

I was doing an ultrasound
project when at one point I couldn't move forward without an
oscilloscope.
I'm hobbyst in electronics, and I don't really need a real
oscilloscope. I don't want to spend money on it and I don't have enough space
in my electronics corner for it.
So, I took a look what is offering at the
Net. I found a great (and free) solution: Winscope.
It's using the sound card and that's all you need. The problem with this
solution is that you just can't get the sample rate more than 44kSamples/sec.
That's enough for audio signals, but not for 40kHz ultrasound signals. So I
switched search to a LPT based oscilloscope: There is a cheap commercial
solution: ScopeOnPC, but I
didn't like it because of half byte (nibble) way of working. Some others:
http://www.techmind.org/ucapwas/ppadc.html
http://nicolas.marchildon.net/electro/oscillo/
There
is lots of similar informative stuff at epanorama
Digital
PC oscilloscope
Bitscope - my
favorite. But too good for my needs.
And there are also others (some are
very expensive) "Turn your PC in an oscilloscope" products.
I wasn't quite
happy with any of these solutions, so I started with my own design. Check the
hardware page for
schematics, and software for the program.

This table shows real max sample rates you can expect from this
oscilloscope:

OS

Machine
type

Sample
rate (kSamples/sec)

Win98

Pentium
MMX at 233 MHz

180

Win98

Pentium4
at 1.6 GHz

257

Win2000

Pentium4
at 1.6 GHz

42

Good luck.

23.05.2002.
Bojan
Banko
mailto:[email-masked]?subject=LPTscope