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Solid State Oscilloscope

George Katz presented a solid state oscilloscope using a matrix of 100 LEDs for display. Although it has a low frequency range and poor resolution, it can still visualize most waveforms. The circuit displays an understanding of displaying analogue waveforms with a simple timebase generator and vertical amplifier. Katz designed a small perspex enclosure to minimize the size. The judges determined it had the highest combination of imagination, design, construction and documentation, awarding it the national winner.

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Rodrigo Negrelli
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71 views4 pages

Solid State Oscilloscope

George Katz presented a solid state oscilloscope using a matrix of 100 LEDs for display. Although it has a low frequency range and poor resolution, it can still visualize most waveforms. The circuit displays an understanding of displaying analogue waveforms with a simple timebase generator and vertical amplifier. Katz designed a small perspex enclosure to minimize the size. The judges determined it had the highest combination of imagination, design, construction and documentation, awarding it the national winner.

Uploaded by

Rodrigo Negrelli
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Solid State Oscilloscope

Electronics Today International, February 1987, p.25

New South Wales I

George Katz of Balgowlah Boys high in Sydney presented a solid state oscilloscope.
He says "probably the best advantage is its very small size and the fact that it can
run off the power supply of the circuit being tested. Although it has a low frequency
range, it can still be used for most circuits. Its poor resolution will still allow for most
waveforms to be visualized."

This was pretty much the judges' own assesment of Katz's project. It uses a matrix of
100 LED's for a display, and does suffer from being slow and having rather poor
resolution. Still we could display a sine wave running at 500Hz without trouble, that
that's not all that dissimilar to commercial solid state osscilloscopes.

The circuit displays an understanding of the mechanics of displaying an analogue


waveform. The timebase is simply a 555 generating a horizontal sweep, while the
vertical amplifier is 3914 with a trimpot on the front. It's extremely simple, but it works.

The LEDs are multiplexed by a 4017 driven by the timebase. This arrangement
reduces the current requirements considerably, no mean consideration when
operating from the power supply of the device under test.
With a device like this, making the unit as small as possible is obviously a
consideration. Katz decided to make his own box out of perspex so that he could
make it just as big as the circuit board, and no bigger. He was also able to give the
thing a fancy shape rather like a bought one.

On the basis that this project had the highest combination of imagination, design
ingenuity, construction and documentation, we made it the national winner.

You can see the circuit for this project on page 108 of The Forrest Mims Engineer's
Notebook. It's published by LLH Technology Publishing (formerly HighText
Publications) and is under $20.00. The ISBN number is 1-878707-03-5. This a
8.5"x11" soft cover manual. This book is full of circuits that the electronics hobbyist
will want to try, using many common components. The circuit for this scope was
published in August of 1979 in Popular Electronics magazine too, with more details
than the book goes into.

The part list:

• PC Board (shown is RS 276-147, 4.5"x6.25")


• 14 pin dip IC socket
• 16 pin dip IC socket
• 20 pin dip IC socket (for the 18 pin LM3914)
• 100 Red LEDs
• LM3914 Dot/Bar Display Driver
• 4011 Quad Nand Gate
• 4017 Decade Counter/Divider
• 100K trimmer pot
• 1K trimmer pot
• SPDT switch
• 1K resistor
• 0.1µf capacitor
• 9V battery
• 9V battery snap
• small amount of wire, bus wire, & solder

I really didn't have anything else better to do when I spent a day bending LED legs
over to make this very limited o-scope. I built a tiny function generator board to play
with the o-scope more, and I tried this board out with a commercial function
generator-- it worked ok. You are not going to see anything like what you'll find on a
commercial oscilloscope, but you will be able to pick out a square wave or sine wave.

If you've ever thought about building such a circuit and wasn't sure how to go about
it, I hope seeing this will help. My board is a bit oversized for the project, as you can
see. If I had upped the LED count to 500 or so, I might have decent resolution, but I'd
need a bigger board too! What I really use this for is watching audio output, kind of a
funky looking bar graph type display. I've changed some values and added a resistor
and a couple caps that weren't in the original schematic, but my board follows the
book fairly closely.

So, if you happen to have a hundred LEDs laying around that you don't know what to
do with...here's the project for you!

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