Sound Card Oscilloscopes At Home DIY Electronics

A good oscilloscope can cost you a lot of money but you can build this PC based oscilloscope for less than a decent cup of coffee. Yes it has limitations but if you have no way of observing the signals in your electronics projects and you can't afford to buy a full featured oscilloscope then this little project could be the answer to your prayers. Not only does it give you a dual channel oscilloscope but it will also do a Fast Fourier Transform analysis of your signals too. More...

Output impedance can seem a bit like black magic until you realize that it's really quite simple. Here is an easy yet effective way of measuring the output impedance of almost any circuit. I've avoided turning this into a full-on mathematical treatment of impedance that would bore you to tears. Instead I give you an easy to understand practical feel to the problem instead.

What can a sound card oscilloscope do for me? This is the question I get asked a lot and I usually say something along the lines of "No engineer can do without one". Not many people find this very helpful so I've built a simple astable multivibrator and applied the oscilloscope to it. In trying to explain what the waveforms mean I hope to answer the question better.

You are going to need test equipment. A multimeter is essential and cheap but it will only take you so far. What you really want is a digital oscilloscope, the ultimate tool of any electronics engineer or hobbyist.

Make this the next project that you build and you will be able to use it to fault find and explore all of your future circuits. But oscilloscopes are expensive, aren't they? Yes they can be but this is a solution that everyone can afford.

I was so impressed by the potential of the Sound Card PC Oscilloscope probe described in an earlier article that I decided to look for alternative software packages that could be used with it. I found one that appears to deliver better results which I am posting here. More...