Software Oscilloscopes
This page shows a list of possible software suitable for Soundcard Oscilloscopes.
The following oscilloscope software products have been tested and are free of charge (or nearly).
Mac OS - Oscilloppoi
This is a very handy software solution, available over the official Apple App Store for a symbolic price of approx. just 1 € while the solution is very fast and has many interesting options including the XY mode. The default controls with the round knobs are a bit tricky to use (turned in a circle) but can be replaced with sliders in the configuration.
It is a dual channel oscilloscope software with XY mode as well and has an inbuild signal generator for use with audio outputs or also as input channel. Oscilloppoi works very well in the frequency range of 20 Hz up to 20 kHz while showing some distortions in the sine waves at more than 10 kHz. This is related to the maximum sampling rate of 48 kHz on the audio channel. The software has no voltage shown on Y axis but using the scale factor 4.5x is showing a signal with approx. 5V/div.
In single trigger mode you can display a single trigger event for further investigations. At any point screenshots can be made with CMD-C and are copied to the clipboard and easily copied in any other software for documentation or other purposes.
Features of Oscilloppoi:
- Dual Channel with XY mode
- Math operations (add and subtract of signals)
- Trigger mode Auto, Normal, Single with Holdoff
- Internal signal generator with sine wave, triangle, sawtooth, square and wave editor
Oscilloppoi App from Apple App Store
WIN - Soundcard Oscilloscope
A software solution for Windows user is the Soundcard Oscilloscope from Christian Zeitnitz which is free of charge for private use. The software runs under several WIN versions like 7/8/10 and was very stable during tests. A calibration factor of 2.5 in the settings gives an approx. good result of the input signal of 1V amplitude.
The software supports dual channel display including XY mode and has also an inbuild signal generator. Additionally this software has a feature of FFT to show the Fourier spectrum of a signal.
Features of WIN Soundcard Oscilloscope:
- Dual Channel with XY mode
- Math operations (add, subtract and multiplication)
- Frequency analysis
- Trigger mode Auto, Normal, Single
- Internal signal generator
- Audio recorder to record incoming signals to a file
There was a small issue with the audio input device we used. WIN 10 recognized this as a mono device (microphone) only while it supports stereo line in. This issues can be solved in the WIN configuration, selecting your audio input device and set the configuration option to Stereo with 48 kHz Sampling frequency.
Windows Soundcard Oscilloscope
Linux - Xoscope
Finally an oscilloscope software for Linux is existing as well but not as comfortable as the above described solutions for Mac and WIN. As usual, you have to build this software with compiler, linker and make.
http://xoscope.sourceforge.net
Data aquisition tools
We will soon report additional solutions and projects for data aquisition based on barebone microcontroller boards with ADC shields to digitize the analog signals.
Microcontroller/System on Chip based input
