Free Download of the Week: Voltage Tracker for Oscilloscope

Suppose you want to measure a slowly-varying voltage from a sensor, or perhaps plot the discharge curve of a battery. Is it really necessary to sit there and note down a reading from the multimeter every so many seconds or minutes? It is less tedious and much more elegant to use this Arduino-based unit connected to your oscilloscope. Two questions motivated Kurt Schuster at the beginning of this project: ‘is my battery any good?’ and ‘is this charger charging my battery correctly?’

All that’s required to measure radiation is a simple PIN photodiode and a suitable preamplifier circuit. We present here an optimised preamplifier and a microcontroller-based counter. The microcontroller takes care of measuring time and pulse rate, displaying the result in counts per minute.The device we describe can be used with different sensors to measure gamma and alpha radiation. It is particularly suitable for long-term measurements and for examining weakly radioactive samples.

If (like most electronics buffs) you only have two hands with ten fingers on each, but lots of measurements to make on your boards, here is an interesting gadget for you. It’s the missing link between crocodile clip and contact point. It allows you to measure, continuously, hands free, with contact points without mechanical attachment, held in place by a flexible gooseneck arm. The probes are interchangeable and the support is very stable.

It seems that to even dip your feet in the ocean of DSP (digital signal processing) you need lots of SMD soldering skills and a ton of math. Seems. Let’s end the anxiety: here is a Universal Audio DSP board for the DIYer. Based on the Analog Devices ADAU1701 DSP, this board has only through-hole components—except for the DSP itself.

To make accurate voltages measurements you need an A/D converter (ADC) chip which has good resolution. The folks at Elektor Labs have developed a board containing a four-channel 16-bit ADC. It’s no coincidence the board uses a Gnublin/EEC connector which makes it compatible with the Elektor’s Linux board, Xmega Webserver and the new Extension shield for Arduino. A universal C library is included to make integration a walk in the park.

Oscilloscopes are the primary measurement tools used today by engineers to test and characterize their power supply designs. The R&S®RTx-K36 frequency response analysis (Bode plot) option provides a low-cost alternative to low frequency network analyzers or dedicated stand- alone frequency analyzers.

Looking at today’s world of electronics, a handful of topics dominate the headlines. These include digitization, artificial intelligence, electrification of transport, autonomous driving, renewable energies and 5G, the next generation of mobile radio. From a higher perspective, they are all interconnected in some way.

Did you know your oscilloscope’s effective number of bits (ENOB) is just as important as the number of ADC bits? ADC bits is one of the most widely known specifications and many engineers rely on this as the sole specification that determines an oscilloscope’s quality. However, the importance of ADC bits is often exaggerated while other critical indications of signal integrity get pushed to the background. In this free whitepaper you learn about the major impacts ENOB has on your measurements.

In his article published in the July & August 2016 issue Elektor author Alfred Rosenkränzer presented a wonderfully simple differential probe for oscilloscopes, based around the AD8479 precision differential amplifier. I built one of them immediately and found it particularly suitable for measurements in the audio range, for example. But one small detail was not covered in this article: the power supply used for the probe (or for several of them). Practically all modern oscilloscopes have a USB port on the front panel for data output. Since the power consumption of a probe is very low, it makes sense to use this socket to power the probe.

Since the majority of electronic circuits these days operate in the digital domain for the most part, the purchase of a 'real' logic analyzer (or perhaps 'protocol analyzer' is a better description?) is becoming increasingly tempting. If you would like to keep it affordable then you will quickly arrive at a device that has a USB connection. But which one is handy, versatile and value for money? In the Elektor Labs we looked at the ScanaQuad series, made by the French company Ikalogic.