how is it useful and what are its basic functions?
In: Engineering
An oscilloscope visualizes how a voltage on an input changes over time. Even very fast changes that happen in a millionth of a second.
This is very useful for many applications. Electrical engineers can verify that a signal in a device looks like expected, an audio engineer can check that an amplifier dont disturb music, and many many things more.
An oscilloscope is a device that draws a graph of the electrical signals. It is similar to a traditional voltmeter and can be used as one. But in addition to just giving you the value it draws a nice graph so you can see how the value change over time. This is very important when you have an electric signal which changes rapidly. You can see how the signal changes, how long it takes to change, if there are overshoots or ringing when it switches. There are lots of these electrical issues you can see with an oscilloscope. Most oscilloscopes also have two or more channels and can map one channel to the x-axis and one to the y-axis. So instead of showing how the signal changes over time you can see how two signals are related.
An oscilloscope is a device for graphing voltage over time in an electrical circuit.
Electricity is fast and invisible. An oscilloscope displays what the electricity is doing on a screen. This makes it an incredibly valuable tool for anyone building or studying electronic devices.
You use a wire called a “probe” to connect the oscilloscope to the circuit.
Older oscilloscopes use a CRT display (like pre-2000’s TV’s), basically they have some fancy electronics to make the probe directly drive the location of the CRT beam.
Newer oscilloscopes have a computer draw the graph on an LCD display.
Depending on how fancy your oscilloscope is, it may have several related functions:
– Change the horizontal axis of the graph, so you can measure shorter / longer periods of time
– Change the vertical axis of the graph, so you can visualize bigger / smaller voltages
– Measure voltage at several points in a circuit (multi-channel)
– Trigger the start of the graph when a voltage exceeds (or drops below) a target
– Graph voltage over time
– Save the graph into a USB drive / SD card / connected computer for further analysis
– Perform math (e.g. subtracting two signals)
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