You might have been wondering why I created the digital-to-analog converter a few days ago.

Well, because I needed a test signal… to build this thing:

You’re looking at a <cough> Digital Storage Scope </cough> with 100 KHz bandwidth :)

First of all: please don’t expect too much. There is no signal conditioning and no triggering whatsoever, and there are no external controls. This is simply a JeeNode plus a Graphics Board. It’s using the built-in ADC, with the conversion clock pushed quite a bit higher than what the Arduino’s analogRead() function will do. This speed comes at the cost of conversion accuracy, which isn’t so important since the Graphics Board display only has 6-bit vertical resolution anyway.

The screenshot shows a 1 KHz sine (from that Bleep! thing, obviously). As you can see, one cycle more-or-less covers the entire x-axis. So that’s about 128 samples per millisecond. This is not the maximum value, the ADC can also work twice as fast – i.e. with a division factor of 4 (ADPS2:0 = 2). This translates to 4 µs per sample.

Using the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem again, you can detect a frequency if you sample it at least twice per cycle, so that would have to be a cycle of at least 8 µs, i.e. over 100 KHz. Which is why I decided to call this thing a 100 KHz DSO :)

The code tries to get as many samples as possible into a little 128-byte buffer before doing the rest of the work. The graphics display has a fairly limited response time, so I’m refreshing the display at 5 Hz (it’s still visible up to 50 Hz, but only just…).

I find it pretty amazing what an MPU such as the ATmega can do these days, with just a few lines of C code. Here’s the entire glcdScope.pde sketch:

The rest of the code is in the same modified ST7565 library as used in the past few days.

There’s lots of room for expansion, this code uses less than 4 Kb.

So there you have it – a very crude, but functional, oscilloscope!