Connecting An Old Scope To A Computer

Scope

A friend of [Michael]’s said his company was getting rid of some old lab equipment and asked him if he wanted a very large and very old digital storage oscilloscope. A ‘hell yes’ and we’re sure a few beers later, [Michael] found an old Gould 200 MHz four-channel scope on his bench. Even 20 years after its production it’s still a capable tool, but the serial ports on the back got [Michael] wondering – would it be possible to plot the screen of the scope on his computer?

The scope has three ports on the back – GPIB, miscellaneous I/O, and RS423. The latter of those ports is similar enough to RS232 that a USB to Serial converter just might work, and with the help of a null modem cable and a terminal, [Michael] was able to connect to this ancient scope.

In the manual, [Michael] found a the serial commands for this scope. The most useful of these is a command that prints out the contents of the scope’s trace memory as a series of 1-byte integers. With a short bit of PERL programming, [Michael] can create a PDF plot of whatever is on the scope’s screen. It’s formatted perfectly for Gnuplot, MATLAB, or even Excel.

Awesome work, and especially useful given these old scopes are slowly making their way to a technological boneyard somewhere.

21 thoughts on “Connecting An Old Scope To A Computer

  1. a friend of mine works at technical uni and they often get rid of soooo awesome equipment…. disassembling equipment that used to cost $50 000 – $100 000 – priceless

    also you notice that 15-20 yrs ago stuff was much better in terms of quality and was designed to LAST decades not a few yrs or months

        1. S’true, 1999 was well into the “don’t build them like they used to” days, I remember the moans myself. Wasn’t planned obsolescence invented in the 1920s or thereabouts? About the same time they stopped using cast iron for everything.

  2. wow… and here I’m using o-scopes from the 70s and 80s still at work. If it still works, we don’t get rid of it. Even if it doesn’t work we may not get rid of it. I would love to have a nice bench scope.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.