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EEVblog #153 – YouScope Demo on a Digital Scope
Posted on March 8th, 2011 21 commentsWhat does the famous YouScope demo look like on a digital scope?
You can download the YouScope demo HERE
21 responses to “EEVblog #153 – YouScope Demo on a Digital Scope”
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When I first saw YouScope online, I downloaded the WAV (actually the FLAC and unpacked it to WAV) and tried to watch it using a software oscilloscope.
It was horrible! The software scope helpfully makes the “trace” visible no matter how fast the dot is moving, sabotaging the means by which Tejeez worked his magic. I tried a few different programs, all of which exhibited the same behavior.
Looks like you ran into precisely the same problem! Your workaround is clever, but depends heavily on the bells and whistles of the individual scope, so I guess I’ll be keeping some analog tubes around a while longer, yet.
(And yes, since 2007, YouScope has been the first test pattern thrown at any X/Y scope that arrives at the shop.)
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Thanks for showing this off. I’ve currently just got an old Philips 25Mhz analog scope that I got at a junk sale for a mere $25, but I’ve been intrigued by this kind of thing for a while, so I’ve been running some experiments of my own. I too, have discovered that the sound card does matter: my cheapy laptop one doesn’t do anything good. I used an EMU0202 USB soundcard that I’ve been using for software defined radio experiments, and it works *much* better.
I’m more of a software guy, so I’m working on a tiny library for generating oscilloscope displays, and here’s a link to the work in progress:
http://brainwagon.org/2011/02/27/animated-vector-graphics-on-an-oscilloscope/
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Janne Ahonen March 8th, 2011 at 19:19
For this kind of use, one should optimally use sound card with non-oversampling DAC, but I guess those are very rare since for normal audio reproduction the oversampling is definitely beneficial.
Regards,
Janne -
I wanted to try this out on my cheap oscope. So I posted a video response. As you can see the traces are visible but the end result is still very impressive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySCeJllM2rs
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The YouTube poster says it was coded in C but you’ll have to take his word it seems. I found that it was in “assembly 2007 shortfilm compo” which could mean anything since that particular compo doesn’t ask for executables or code.
I found a mention on the YT comments that AVS couldn’t generate the necessary rates to do this however that doesn’t to me mean that AVS wasn’t involved. The AVS source was released years ago and it supports XY laser scanners – it’s possible that if necessary it was modified to “render” into xy wav output instead of doing realtime output on PC display. There’s a plugin done before this demo was posted on YouTube that simulated Oscilloscope XY display.
Now you may wonder why I’m ruining the party – well it’s just funny to see all knowing engineers think this is something amazing when infact the real amazing thing could just be that guy who made Winamp, AVS, Reaper, NINJAM and millions IS amazing guy. But that’s sort of old news.
I use Ninjam every week. If you thought this demo was amazing, obviously you haven’t seen AVS nevermind Ninjam which is much more amazing than AVS.
What’s even better than Ninjam and AVS? Well a belgian guy has been working 5 years alone on a game engine that leaves the big name commercial engines to dust atleast in one respect (Which matters a lot to anyone who has played ELITE back in the days), he just announced the project is going commercial and anyone can license the engine with special cheap license promised for hobbyists projects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3muhlQYFgLE
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btw if you can’t view the videos in fullscreen anymore as I found trying to watch this one, Adobe recently released update to Flash that may break YouTube fullscreen on some computers since the full-screen hardware acceleration is enabled by default and doesn’t seem to work with current Nvidia drivers. Just right click the video/settings/ and disable hw acceleration and restart the video.
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Franki March 12th, 2011 at 11:13
For some reason, I never tried running this demo on my old Hamed 20MHz, despite being interested in the demo scene too, hit me for that.
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I tried this at work and the text was inverted at first like on your screen. I had to invert the channel and it looked much better.
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I like the background music, quite nice for a speed-up video. Can anyone tell me it’s name please?
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jannekoiv September 6th, 2011 at 12:34
I once wrote a simple X/Y oscilloscope software because I wanted to see this demo and couldn’t find anything useful for Linux at that time. Took about two to three hours using gstreamer for audio input from sound card and SDL for display.
With some additional filtering it actually worked almost as well as a real analog oscilloscope I later tried at school.
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Like the Hameg Dave, great value in a scope, the new ones are packed with value!
http://youtu.be/BRgjFJp5xPoThought I’d try this, just for fun, on an Rohde & Schwarz RTO1000 series scope, just to see how it did. Didn’t spend much time optimising it, and used the link off your site here right off an Apple iPod touch, so the file was streaming through WiFi and out the audio port to the scope. While I was in XY mode, I thought, what the heck, let’s show the source channels on the right side of the screen and an FFT underneath it all. Because I can. Or more to the point, because the scope can… (I’ll show four maths, and 12 traces at the same time, if you want it to, just off the analogue channels) Info on the scope at http://www.scope-of-the-art.com You know R&S now has Hameg as part of them, right? Good news for both companies…
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ObsoletePower February 11th, 2013 at 12:18
For those that have the Agilent InfiniiVision scope and want to run this demo, I will post a short set of instructions on how to achieve this.
I ran this demo from the headphone jack on my laptop which does not have a powerful sound card by any means. I also used a run-of-the-mill male to male TRS audio cable that I had lying around. Connect your CH1 and CH2 test probes to the first 2 pins and both grounds to the 3rd pin.
1. Press “Default Setup” to reset your previous settings.
2. Press “Horiz” and change Time Mode to XY
3. Adjust both CH1 and CH2 to about 500mV / division and go from there.
4. Run the audio file in VLC and observe the scope. If the picture is rotated by 90 degrees then switch the test probes.
5. Press Display and enable Infinite Persistence
6. Adjust the signal intensity until the draw lines blend into the persistence grain.
7. Invert both CH1 and CH2 so that the animation is displayed the correct way.
8. Adjust the CH1 and CH2 vertical knobs to fill the screen and ENJOY!
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Nate B March 8th, 2011 at 15:31