Sound Card Oscilloscope Software

Sound Card Oscilloscope Probe Software

The articles about sound card oscilloscopes have been so popular that I've written a whole book about it. The book shows you exactly how you can build the scope into a nice enclosure so that you can conveniently use it on all of your projects.

I've included a project which adds two additional features that allow you to generate signal waveforms using the headphone output and to calibrate the scope so that you make absolute amplitude measurements. I also cover two very capable and yet free-to-use software applications that can be used with it. The book is available now in kindle format from here: Sound Card Oscilloscope - Build Better Electronic Projects

The sound card oscilloscope probe that you can build from the article How To Make A Free Sound Card PC Oscilloscope is great for examining waveforms from around 20Hz to 15kHz and it has a lot of potential especially if you don't have the use of a full blown commercial oscilloscope. The software that I used in the article is called Winscope and does a pretty good job but I did notice one or two not so good points with it so I went looking for alternatives. I found one that I am very pleased with on first sight and I wanted to tell you about it here.

Winscope had two small problems. The first one is that you can't expand the widow to dedicate your entire screen to the oscilloscope. At least I couldn't find a way to do it. This isn't a big problem but it would be a nice to have feature. Also the traces offered by Winscope were a little ragged around the edges. Again not a big problem but I had hoped for something a little better.

Soundcard Oscilloscope by Christian Zeitnitz

I came across the Soundcard Oscilloscope which is free for private and non commercial use and decided to try it out. I was pleasantly surprised. I found that not only could the scope window be resized to full screen but the displayed signals seem to be much cleaner and stable. I tried it out on my multivibrator and you can see the results below.

The image above shows the Soundcard Oscilloscope displaying signals from the collector and base of one transistor of a multivibrator circuit running at approximately 1kHz.

The image above shows the Soundcard Oscilloscope displaying signals from the collector and base of one transistor of a multivibrator circuit running at approximately 12kHz.