Raindrops On An Oscilloscope

Something very beautiful appeared in our feed this evening, something that has to be shared. [Duncan Malashock] has created an animation of raindrops creating ripples. Very pretty, you might say, but where’s the hack? The answer is, he’s done it as a piece of vector display work on an oscilloscope.

He’s using [Trammell Hudson’s] V.st Teensy-powered vector graphics board. We’ve featured this board before, but then it was playing vector games rather than today’s piece of artwork. The ‘scope in question is slightly unusual, a Leader LBO-51, a device optimized for vector work rather than the general purpose ‘scopes we might be used to. The artwork is written using Processing, and all the code is available in a GitHub repository.

So sit back and enjoy the artwork unfolding in the video. We look forward to more work featuring this hardware.

Though we’ve not featured any vector graphic pure artwork before, we’ve featured quite a few vector graphics projects over the years here at Hackaday. There is this FPGA-driven vector arcade machine, some vectorscope animations from Germany, and of course a Vectrex console brought back from the dead. Does this playable oscilloscope Tetris Easter egg count, or is it a raster?

20 thoughts on “Raindrops On An Oscilloscope

  1. Thanks very much for the write-up, Jenny, and thanks to all of you who commented for the encouragement. I’m glad you enjoyed this clip. Trammell and I, along with a few other folks like Adelle Lin and Jacob Joaquin, have been working off and on together on the v.st project and associated code libraries for some time, so you can look forward to more projects from our group in the near future.

  2. Add a variable “wind” parameter, so the drops don’t have to fall straight down, and a “rate” parameter so the intensity of the simulated rainfall can be adjusted, and…

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