How to assemble an oscilloscope with your own hands

An electronic oscilloscope is an indispensable thing in production, in a home or educational laboratory. This meter allows you to look into the operation of electronic circuits, showing on the screen the dynamics of the change in the input potential. It is indispensable when setting up powerful thyristor converters in production. It helps in troubleshooting electrical circuits for monitoring, protecting or controlling the process, significantly reducing equipment downtime.

Collecting an oscilloscope with your own hands is a difficult task for a radio amateur, but only if you follow the traditional way, trying to simulate the work of modern measuring instruments. We are talking about analog and digital devices that are manufactured on an industrial scale.

The picture changes radically if a personal computer is used as a computing node and visual control over the measured voltage. High-speed modern processors are able to solve any problems, and a large monitor for monitoring the measured signal will be only a plus. It remains only to collect a small circuit, and you will make an oscilloscope with your own hands. The device does not require an initial setup.

Let's look at the main parts of the product. The circuit and the program for flashing the controller you can easily find in the specialized literature. Typically, the device has one or more analog inputs. By setting an adjustable divider on one of them, you can change the amplitude of the input signal. This is done to extend the measuring range of the device. As a protection against exceeding the permissible voltage, we establish a parametric stabilizer or any other device that limits the level of the input voltage. All you can connect the analog inputs to the microprocessor's input, the outputs of which are connected to the connector for connecting the device to the USB port. The circuit is powered by the same port.

Thus, we made our own oscilloscope with our own hands, but to start the device it is necessary to program the microcontroller and install an interface program to recognize the input signals to your computer. The controller is programmed with a programmer and installed on the board. Just install the desired program on the computer. As you guessed it, you made your own usb oscilloscope with your own hands. The basic requirement is that all installation and programming operations must be performed correctly.

As you can see, it's not difficult to make a digital oscilloscope with your own hands. The speed of this device allows you to configure, repair or study the principle of operation of simple electronic circuits. Such a device is useful in a home laboratory.

To increase the speed of the device used in several ways, but all lead to a complication of the original scheme. To switch the device to a computer, you can use a parallel port, this will bypass the sampling frequency of the USB port and increase the speed.

In addition, there are special cards that are inserted into the computer and serve to process input signals.