This might be just the thing for that old laptop sitting around and you wished you had an DSO to measure that project on your bench or earth battery outside. Designed to be an audio analyzer, it looks impressive. Go here:
http://www.baudline.com/what_is_baudline.html
Looks like a steep learning curve, but hey it's free!
Tishatang
awesome this would be great for the datalogging for the earth battery experimenters.
It says it runs on FreeBSD. I wonder if it will run under the terminal
in Apple OS 10.
How do you relate the MHZ scope figure to the speed of the waveform
that you wish to study?
Paul.
@paul-R
It sounds like you know more about computers than I do? In the brief look at it when I found it, somewhere it tells you how to figure the speed. In might have been in the screenshots help section. I know that it samples sound at least to 196 K times per second. Maybe it can go faster?
Look in the FAQ section for answers to compatibility and what sound cards to use.
I would think the highest speed is limited by the soundcard in the computer. That is the interface for the software.
According to my experience, it is very difficult for sound-card based oscilloscopes to handle measurements of DC voltage or AC signal with DC components. I am sure there are better alternatives available on the internet.
Thanks immensely, I have been looking for a tool of just this type. I am downloading it now and will see if it works on my Ubuntu laptop. I have an immediate need for some of its features, but I don't know (yet) how to hook it up. I assume it takes input from the microphone or line in jack. USB input would really be nice. We'll see soon.
Thanks again...there goes the rest of the afternoon!!
Well, the download and install went painlessly, it takes input from the laptop's built-in microphone just fine...nice waterfall display...seems to be very useful potentially. It's a stand-alone executable and as long as you have the prereq packages (which I apparently must have) it just sits in its own directory and works.
But it looks like the learning curve will be pretty steep, and there may still be some problem with my sound card config, as I can't yet get baudline to play back files or clips.
a good freeby for windoze is spectran, it´s not a DSO just a good live spectrogram that is fairly configurable, here it is showing submarine VLF transmissions with 100m of wire straight into a sound card:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg-YgrvTcM&feature=related
website and free download:
http://www.sdrham.com/spectran.html
seems to work fine on vistagh and xpee.
@TinselKoala
Here is link that led me to discover baudline.
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/08/04/linux-music-workflow-switching-from-mac-os-x-to-ubuntu-with-kim-cascone/#more-6837
Maybe you can ask someone on this site to advise any problem you are having. Hope it all works out for you.