Winscope Oscilloscope Download =LINK=
Coralie Sliter
The oscilloscope contains in addition a signal generator for 2 channels for sine, square, triangular, sawtooth wave forms and different noise spectra in the frequency range from 0 to 20kHz. The signal can be defined by a mathematical formula as well. The signals are available at the speaker output of the sound card. These can be fed back to the oscillocope in order to generate Lissajous figures in the x-y mode.
The signals for the oscilloscope can be internal to the computer (MP3 player, function generator etc.) or from external sources (line-in, microphone). For external sources care has to be taken, not to exceed the voltage range of the inputs. The range is usually only 0.7V !! If higher voltage need to be analyzed, a voltage divider has to be used. Additional protection diodes are recommended in order to avoid any damage to the sound card and to the computer.
The articles about sound card oscilloscopes have been so popular that I've written a whole book about it. The book shows you exactly how you can build the scope into a nice enclosure so that you can conveniently use it on all of your projects.
The sound card oscilloscope probe that you can build from the article How To Make A Free Sound Card PC Oscilloscope is great for examining waveforms from around 20Hz to 15kHz and it has a lot of potential especially if you don't have the use of a full blown commercial oscilloscope. The software that I used in the article is called Winscope and does a pretty good job but I did notice one or two not so good points with it so I went looking for alternatives. I found one that I am very pleased with on first sight and I wanted to tell you about it here.
Winscope had two small problems. The first one is that you can't expand the widow to dedicate your entire screen to the oscilloscope. At least I couldn't find a way to do it. This isn't a big problem but it would be a nice to have feature. Also the traces offered by Winscope were a little ragged around the edges. Again not a big problem but I had hoped for something a little better.
Setting Up:
The two 100k preset resistors adjust the purity of the sine wave. If adjusted correctly, then the distortion amounts to less than 1%. The output waveform ideally needs to be monitored with an oscilloscope, but most people reading this will not have access to one. There is however, an easy alternative:- Winscope. This piece of software uses your soundcard and turns your computer into an oscilloscope. It even has storage facility and a spectrum analyser, however it will only work up to around 20KHz or so. Needless to say, this is more than adequate for this circuit, as alignment on any range automatically aligns other ranges as well. Winscope is available at my download page click here. Winscope is freeware and designed by Konstantin Zeldovich. After downloading, read the manual supplied with winscope and make up a lead to your soundcard. My soundcard is a SoundBlaster with a stereo line input, i made up a lead with both left and right inputs connected together. Connect the lead to the high output of the function generator, set the output level to high, shape to sine, and use the 1k to 10k range, (22nF capacitor). A waveform should be displayed, see the Figure 1 below:-
Here an undistorted sine wave is being displayed. The display on winscope may flicker, this is normal as it uses your soundcard to take samples of the input waveform. The "hold" button on winscope will display a steady waveform.
The two presets work together, so adjusting one affects the other. A little is all that's needed. When your waveform is adjusted and looks similar to Figure 1 press the FFT button on winscope. This will perform a fast Fourier transform and the displayed output will be a spectrogram of the input. For a pure sine wave, only one signal is present, the fundamental frequency, no harmonics will be present and so a spectrogram for a pure sine should contain a single spike, see Figure 2 below:-
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