pc osciloscope

hi i am looking into building an osciliscope to plug into the parralel port of the p.c or usb port, or even the pci bus. i have a pic programmer so i can program the pics, looking for potential solutions to the problem. if anyone has done this already succesfully i would like to know. mainly for dc voltage pulses. i did electronics many years ago and i am very rusty to say the least.
all help is appreciated.


cheers mat

i havn't built one ..but ..by using lpt for the scope u limit the speed , and u'll need to write device drivers for the usb/pci . i have seen a pc based scope which uses the soundcard as the interface

pc oscilloscope

i know pico scope use the parralel port for their scope, i have tried searching the net for a schematic for it but to no avail, also bitscope provide circuit diagrams and everything but the 16f84 pic chip is programmed by them and haven't found a download for that either.

Hi
PIC microcontroller is not not enough to build digital storage osciloscope you need an FPGA , a fast ADC, and a static RAM the FPGA is used to control the sampling rate and to store the analog samples in the SRAM the microcontroller is used to manage the transfer of data from the SRAM to the PC you can use a microcontroller with USB port if you want to transfer data to the PC through the USB port or you can use any other microcontroller if you want to transfer the data to the PC through the parallel port. The following link has can help you building your oscilloscope
http://www.johann-glaser.at/projects/DSO/

Kamal Daniel

Yes, there are essentially two ways to do it, one uses the PC itself, using either the sound card as an input, or the parallel port to input an A2D - these methods are generally very low spec.

The other method is to do the sampling and storing on an external board, and use the PC merely as a display screen - this is MUCH more expensive though, as you're essentialy building a complete digital storage scope - just minus the screen.

There are plenty of projects out there, many people do them as their main project while at University - and you can often find full details of them, but perfomance tends to be pretty variable?.

there is also bitscope:
https://www.bitscope.com/

open design, if you don't want to buy completed product, you can built it.
you can also buy it as kit or just pcb or just pcb plus programmed chips etc.