Super In-Depth $15 Curve Tracer Project

[Jason Jones] has always wanted a curve tracer for his home shop. When he was starting out in electronics he fell in love with a machine called a Huntron Tracker 2000. This machine would feed a sine wave into a circuit on one side and plot a XY graph on the other.

[Jason] figured that with a modern microcontroller such a device could be build simply and cheaply for around $15 dollars. With that requirement in mind he set out to build it. He selected a PIC24F16KM202 for the brain and got to work.

The write-up is really great. It’s rare that someone puts every step of their development and design thinking into writing. Some have argued that this is the only true way to have an OSHW hardware project. The series covers everything from the initial requirements and parts selection to the software development and eventual testing of the device.

[Jason] managed to build a pretty capable little curve tracer in the end. We really enjoyed it when he used the tracer to debug the tracer.

4 thoughts on “Super In-Depth $15 Curve Tracer Project

  1. I Have a tracker 2000. They are fantastic for troubleshooting stuff. I have wanted to build something like this for some time. Since I have the Tracker, I’m not too desperate since I have one though.

  2. Pretty poor resolution to be honest.

    A 50p Lm324 set up as a differential amplifier, 2 buffers and wein bridge is all it actually is.

    You need to work on your x-y plot resolution and increase sampling speed heavily on the PIC.

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