This Build Puts a Basic Digital Storage Oscilloscope in the Palm of Your Hand

While limited — particularly in being unable to read any voltage below 0V — Creative Lau's project is simple, cheap, and quickly assembled.

Gareth Halfacree
5 years agoDebugging / HW101
Lau's STC-powered design is simple, though somewhat limited. (📷: Creative Lau)

Maker Creative Lau has published a guide for building a simple miniature digital storage oscilloscope (DSO), powered by a DIP-packaged STC Micro STC8A8K64S4A12 microcontroller installed onto prototyping board.

"This is a simple oscilloscope made with STC MCU," Lau explains of the project. "You can use this Mini DSO to observe waveform [with a] time interval [of] 100us-500ms, voltage range [of] 0-30V, [and a] draw Mode [of] vector or dots."

As well as the microcontroller, the build uses a compact SPI-bus OLED display, a 3.7V lithium-ion battery pack for portability, a 5V boost converter, and a rotary encoder and switch for its user interface and to power it on and off.

While limited — the oscilloscope, once assembled, is unable to read negative voltages, meaning that its readings will always stop at zero regardless of how low the voltage goes, it's a simple build — and goes hand-in-hand with an earlier STC-powered function generator Lau has showcased on his YouTube channel.

The full build guide for the DSO is available on Instructables.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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