Oscillating
Oct. 1st, 2013 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsI still know pretty close to nothing about analog electronics, but I did just do a pretty neat thing:
A little while ago I bought this kit for a 555 timer, because I thought it looked neat. "But wait," you're thinking, "a 555 timer is one chip, you don't need a kit for that." This one was a kit for a discrete 555 timer, the same circuit that's inside the world's most common IC, but made of discrete transistors and things. I put it together, and then I realized I had no idea how to test it.
So, then I got an oscilloscope. Turns out oscilloscopes cost a fortune, like in the thousands for a good one and high three figures for even a lame one, so I got the cheapest one I could: the DSO Nano v3. It's about the size of an iPod, and most of the reviews (no doubt written by people who have the $1k-and-up scopes at work) deride it as a toy. But I figured, what the hell, it's not like I know what I'm doing anyway.
When it got here it was neat, but other than use it as a glorified volt meter I had no way of testing it. Until tonight, when I wired up the 555 timer with it.
What an oscilloscope does is act as a volt meter really fast. You wire it across two points of a circuit, and it checks the voltage between them thousands of times per second, and graphs the results. So, if you wire up a 555 timer in such a way that it generates a square wave out of one pin, then you should also be able to hook an oscilloscope to that pin and watch the square wave in action.
And it turns out that you can:
That is a screenshot from the oscilloscope watching the square wave. It's some ridiculous 300 Hz or something because I didn't have the right capacitor for the circuit, but both the timer and the oscilloscope work.
Next, to get a normal-sized 555 timer or three, and experiment making more interesting waves with these (a normal-sized one will be a lot less cluttered).
A little while ago I bought this kit for a 555 timer, because I thought it looked neat. "But wait," you're thinking, "a 555 timer is one chip, you don't need a kit for that." This one was a kit for a discrete 555 timer, the same circuit that's inside the world's most common IC, but made of discrete transistors and things. I put it together, and then I realized I had no idea how to test it.
So, then I got an oscilloscope. Turns out oscilloscopes cost a fortune, like in the thousands for a good one and high three figures for even a lame one, so I got the cheapest one I could: the DSO Nano v3. It's about the size of an iPod, and most of the reviews (no doubt written by people who have the $1k-and-up scopes at work) deride it as a toy. But I figured, what the hell, it's not like I know what I'm doing anyway.
When it got here it was neat, but other than use it as a glorified volt meter I had no way of testing it. Until tonight, when I wired up the 555 timer with it.
What an oscilloscope does is act as a volt meter really fast. You wire it across two points of a circuit, and it checks the voltage between them thousands of times per second, and graphs the results. So, if you wire up a 555 timer in such a way that it generates a square wave out of one pin, then you should also be able to hook an oscilloscope to that pin and watch the square wave in action.
And it turns out that you can:
That is a screenshot from the oscilloscope watching the square wave. It's some ridiculous 300 Hz or something because I didn't have the right capacitor for the circuit, but both the timer and the oscilloscope work.
Next, to get a normal-sized 555 timer or three, and experiment making more interesting waves with these (a normal-sized one will be a lot less cluttered).
