OSCILLOSCOPE Add-on board
Electronic Measurement? BitScope & RasPi! SKILL LEVEL : BEGINNER
Karl-Ludwig
Guest Writer
An oscilloscope is only for professionals and rather expensive!? If you think this sentence is true then read on.
In this first part of the article we are going to setup the hardware, install the software and take our first graph.
The BitScope Micro from the Australian manufacturer BitScope Designs is a small addon board especially adapted to the Raspberry Pi, with which you can turn your Raspberry Pi into an oscilloscope, logic analyser, spectrum analyser and a waveform generator. In this miniseries, I am going to show you how to setup this dynamic duo and use its features to understand how electronic circuits work and debug them if they do not work.
Assuming you have your Raspberry Pi up and running, make sure that your Raspbian installation is up to date by typing:
First things first: what is an oscilloscope anyway? An oscilloscope is an electronic measurement device with which you can measure different electrical parameters such as voltages, frequencies, etc.. With a digital multimeter you are able to measure an electrical voltage and see a numerical representation of it in the display. However, an oscilloscope presents a graphical representation of the voltage over time. The oscilloscope does this by plotting measurements using a Cartesian co-ordinate system.
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sudo apt- get update sudo apt- get upgrade - y
Next, install the BitScope software with the following procedure: 1 ) Download the BitScope DSO 2.7 package from the BitScope Download area from http://bitscope.com/pi/ and save it into the directory /home/pi on your Raspberry Pi. 2) When the download is complete, fire up your file manager, navigate to /home/pi directory and right click on the downloaded package and choose Open with from the context menu. 3) Select the custom command line tab, enter sudo dpkg - i and click OK.