I’ve been having a good play with my new CircuitGear CGR-101 PC based oscilloscope. The protocol is open so it’s simple enough to write your own application that uses the data in interesting ways.
The first thing to try is a simple multimeter. You can easily do 1024 samples ten times a second so there’s enough data to calculate the mean, RMS, peak-to-peak, and frequency of the signal being measured.
I’ve had good experiences with Python and PyGTK before so a quick mock up in Glade gives this:
Clicking the big button toggles it between the different display modes. The progress bar gives a nice, immediate analogue feeling for how the voltage is changing. Now to actually implement it…