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…

ESP32 Oscilloscope Skips Screen For The Browser

An oscilloscope can be an expensive piece of equipment, but not every measurement needs four channels and gigahertz sampling rates. For plenty of home labs, old oscilloscopes with CRTs can be found…

Power Supply Efficiency Measurements

Even if you don’t have a Rohde Schwarz oscilloscope, you can still enjoy their recent video about using an oscilloscope to measure power supply efficiency. Of course, you don’t have to …

This Baby ‘Scope Is Within Your Reach

The modern oscilloscope is truly a marvelous instrument, being a computer with a high-speed analogue front end which can deliver the function of an oscilloscope alongside that of a voltmeter and a …

Beyond The Basics: Exploring More Exotic Scope Trigger Modes

Last time, we looked at some powerful trigger modes found on many modern scopes, including the Rigol DHO900 series we used as an example. Those triggers were mostly digital or, at least, threshold-…

Beyond The Basics: Exploring Exotic Scope Trigger Modes

Will Rogers once said that veterinarians are the best doctors because their patients can’t tell them where it hurts. I’ve often thought that electronic people have a similar problem. In…

STM32 Offers Performance Gains For DIY Oscilloscope

There’s no shortage of cheap digital oscilloscopes available today from the usual online retailers, but that doesn’t mean the appeal of building your own has gone away — especiall…

Tetris On An Oscilloscope, The Software Way

When we talk about video games on an oscilloscope, you’d be pardoned for assuming the project involved an analog CRT scope in X-Y mode, with vector graphics for something like Asteroids or Ba…

The Magic Of A Diode Sampler To Increase Oscilloscope Bandwidth

Making an oscilloscope is relatively easy, while making a very fast oscilloscope is hard. There’s a trick that converts a mundane instrument into a very fast one, it’s been around since…

Fixing A C64 With A Cheap $20 Oscilloscope

Modern computers are so fast and complex that we would seldom try and fix them on a component level with simple DIY tools. Working on an early 1980s computer is much easier by comparison, with the …

Hackaday Prize 2023: This Differential Scope Probe Is Smarter Than It Looks

A differential probe, a device for measuring the voltage between two points in a circuit rather than the voltage between a point and ground, it an extremely useful addition to any electronics bench…

$13 Scope And Logic Analyzer Hits 18 Msps

We aren’t sure what’s coolest about [Richard Testardi’s] Flea-Scope. It costs about $13 plus the cost of making the PCB. It operates at 18 million samples per second. It also does…

Saving A Scope From The Dumpster

If you read Hackaday, you probably get the title of [SunEstra’s] post: A Casual Date with the Dumpster. Many great hacking projects start with finding one man’s trash. This June, [SunEs…

Spinning CRT Makes A 360 Degree Audio Oscilloscope

A question for you: if the cathode ray tube had never been invented, what would an oscilloscope look like? We’re not sure ourselves, but it seems like something similar to this mechanical tac…

STM32 Oscilloscope Uses All The Features

[jgpeiro] is no slouch when it comes to building small, affordable oscilloscopes out of common microcontrollers. His most recent, based on an RP2040 with two channels that ran at 100 MSps, put it o…

The Simplest Curve Tracer Ever

To a lot of us, curve tracing seems to be one of those black magic things that only the true wizards understand. But as [DiodeGoneWild] explains, curve tracing really isn’t all that complicat…

Examining Test Gear From Behind The Iron Curtain

Back in 1978, an oscilloscope was an exotic piece of gear for most homebrewers. We expect they were even more rare in private hands behind the iron curtain, and [Thomas Scherrer] shows us a Soviet …