A low cost portable oscilloscope based on Arduino and GLCD

Oscilloscopes are very useful electronic instruments that enable one to see voltage wave-shapes in an electronic circuit. But these instruments are very expensive and average students can hardly afford to buy one. This paper describes the design and development of a low-cost portable oscilloscope based on Arduino and Graphical Liquid Crystal Display (GLCD). This project is designed and developed to achieve the same functionality that traditional oscilloscopes have. An Atmel microcontroller is used for data acquisition which will then be displayed as a waveform on a GLCD screen as it would have appeared on a traditional CRT oscilloscope. The oscilloscope displays waveforms in real-time by reading a finite number of samples and storing them into its internal RAM. Once the memory is full the Microcontroller will stop sampling and transfer the data to the GLCD display. This handheld oscilloscope is very cheap, uses low power, generates low internal noise, uses very few components and easy to operate.