how is it useful and what are its basic functions?
In: Engineering
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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