Double Your Analog Oscilloscope Fun With This Retro Beam Splitter

These days, oscilloscope hacking is all about enabling features that the manufacturer baked into the hardware but locked out in the firmware. Those hacks are cool, of course, but back in the days o…

Close Shave For An Old Oscilloscope Saved With A Sticky Note

When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high-precision gear like oscilloscopes from the tim…

Retrogadgets: Oscilloscope Cameras

Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB st…

Component Tester Teardown

In the modern age, when you hear “component tester” you probably think of one of those cheap microcontroller-based devices that can identify components and provide basic measurements on…

Don’t Forget Your Curve Tracer

As cheap microcontrollers have given us an impressive range of test equipment trinkets to play with, it’s easy to forget some of the old standabys. A curve tracer for example, the relatively …

Signal Processing Shenanigans: The Createc SC 01 Pocket Oscilloscope

If you’re passionate about signal processing and retro tech, you’ll want to check out the Createc SC 01, a quirky handheld oscilloscope that recently caught the eye of [Thomas Scherrer] from OZ2CPU…

Classic Heathkit OL-1 Scope Gets Some TLC

These days, not only are oscilloscopes very common, but even a cheap instrument today would have been the envy of the world’s greatest labs not that long ago. But back in the day, the home ex…

Tearing Down A Digital Scope From ’78

If you’re a fan of vintage electronics and DIY tinkering, you’ll find this teardown by [Thomas Scherrer] fascinating. In a recent video, he delves into a rare piece of equipment: the Da…

Supercon 2023: Aleksa Bjelogrlic Dives Into Circuits That Measure Circuits

Oscilloscopes are one of our favorite tools for electronics development. They make the hidden dances of electrons visually obvious to us, and give us a clear understanding of what’s actually …

Hackaday Links: September 1, 2024

Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We&#82…

Handheld Oscilloscope Meter Reviewed

We live in a time where there’s virtually no excuse not to have some kind of oscilloscope. As [IMSAI Guy] shows in a recent video, for what you might expect to pay for a decent meter, you can…

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Pi-O-Scope-Pong

[Aaron Lager]’s Pi-O-Scope-Pong project takes a minimal approach to Pong by drawing on an oscilloscope to generate crisp paddles and ball. A Raspberry Pi takes care of the grunt work of signa…

Recovering An Agilent 2000a/3000a Oscilloscope With Corrupt Firmware NAND Flash

Everyone knows that you can never purchase enough projects off EBay, lest boredom might inadvertently strike. That’s why [Anthony Kouttron] got his mitts on an Agilent DSO-X 2014A digital osc…

A Brief Look Inside A Homebrew Digital Sampler From 1979

While we generally prefer to bring our readers as much information about a project as possible, sometimes we just have to go with what we see. That generally happens with new projects and work in p…

A Scope Test Tool You Can Build With Just A Pico

Ever wanted to see how well your oscilloscope adheres to its stated capabilities? What if you buy a new scope and need a quick way to test it lest one of its channels its broken, like [Paul Wasserm…

Understand Your Tools: Finger Exercises

A dip meter is basically a coil of wire that, when you excite it, you can use to tell if something inside that coil is resonating along. This lets you measure unknown radio circuits to figure out t…

The Short Workbench

Imagine an electronics lab. If you grew up in the age of tubes, you might envision a room full of heavy large equipment. Even if you grew up in the latter part of the last century, your idea might …

STM32 Draws On Scope

Drawing on an oscilloscope’s XY mode isn’t a new idea. However, if you’ve ever wanted to give it a go, you’d be hard-pressed to find more information than the nearly hour-an…

Your Scope, Armed And Ready

[VoltLog] never has enough space on his bench. We know the feeling and liked his idea of mounting his oscilloscope on an articulated arm. This is easy now because many new scopes have VESA mounts l…