In this episode, I walk you through a quick start using the Digilent Analog Discovery 2 scope to measure a few Arduino signals.
Here is the scope we will use today.
The first step is download the Digilent Waveforms software from here.
When you start up the waveforms software with no scope attached, you can use your sound card in your PC as a scope to analyze sound signals. See this article I wrote in Nuts and Volts about this method.
Once you are familiar with the interface, we can use the scope to measure some common signals.
There are three important controls to learn:
- The vertical scale adjust
- The horizontal scale adjust
- The trigger
I am using an Arduino as a signal source. In particular, we’ll run a simple application to modulate pin 13 by turning it off and on every 1 msec. At the same time we will make in 12 a HIGH and pin 11 a LOW. We call these a quiet high and a quiet low. They are sense lines we can use to sniff out the noise on the power rails.
We are just using this as a simple measurement to show some the cool measurements we can do with the scope and some of the insights we can gain from such measurements. There will be future episodes in which we cover these more detailed topics.
Here is the slightly modified Blink sketch I used in the video:
void setup() {
pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
pinMode(12, OUTPUT);
pinMode(11, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(12, HIGH);
digitalWrite(11, LOW);
}
void loop() {
digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
delay(1);
digitalWrite(13, LOW);
delay(1);
}
