[bitluni] got a brand new scope, and he couldn’t be happier. No, really — check the video below; he’s really happy. And to celebrate, he turned his scope into a vector display using an ESP32.
Using a scope in X-Y mode is nothing new, of course. The technique is used to display everything from Lissajous patterns from an SDR to bouncing balls from an analog computer. Taken on as more of an exercise to learn how to use his new tool than a practical project, [bitluni]’s project starts by using two DACs on an ESP32 to create simple Lissajous patterns to learn about the scope’s controls. Next he built some code to display 3D point clouds, but learned that the native DAC code wasn’t up to the job. A little hacking improved the speed 27-fold, which was enough for great 3D images and live video from an I²S camera module. The latter was accomplished by grabbing frames from the camera and rendering them pixel by pixel, CRT style. The results are pretty clean, and there’s a lot to be learned about both using scopes as X-Y displays and tweaking the ESP32 for maximum performance.
Need more background on the ESP32? Start by checking out these ESP32 tutorials.
Neat!
Awesome hack!
Seems like this is using raster to vector conversion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics#Conversion
If it is a Digital scope it is for sure.
Who will be first to implement on this hardware the original vector-graphics video game classic “Space War” (I have the original Space War FORTRAN source code around here somewhere buried under decades of ancient technological treasures) that ran on minicomputer vector displays back in the early 70s? You could port Space War from the Apple2, or other home computer architectures.
Here it is a WikiPedia, complete with a photo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!
Better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!
Hmm. The exclamation mark is supposed to be part of the link! This means you Hackaday! Let’s try adding a trailing slash to the URL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!/
Nope! Wikipedia does not like the trailing slash. Just click the first link and then click the embedded Spacewar! link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar
Looks like WordPress uses the HTML Code version for punctuation marks, i.e. & # 33 ; (no spaces):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!
Ew… didn’t like that… either… maybe add some HTML Link or Hyperlink syntax a href /a stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!
Does the HTML code only work in the WordPress WYSIWYG editor and not in the comments section? Uh… what is the way.
I used to Spacewar! at University of Minnesota, Institute of Technology, Physics Department, back in 1973 and 1974, on a large 3-foot diameter vector display then common at airport flight control towers (and some universities).
Here, you can play it.
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/
I just came across some old video from ’91 of my classmates and I presenting our keystone project where we recreated hardware and software to make our version of spacewar so this seems timely. Now where is that code…
“a oscilloscope”? Let me guess: you’re one of those people who pronounces ‘oscilloscope’ as “sillyscope”.
O-smell-O-scope ?maybe?
Looks a lot more usable xy display than on my 1054z sw version 00.04.03. Maybe more recent firmware changes its behavior. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to switch off the voltage over time display above a tiny xy window.