Pocket Oscilloscope

Senior Design Team: Patrick Kruse, David Newell, & Kyle Ringgenberg
Rice University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

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Motivation

Hardware Design Phase One

The purpose of mobile electronics is user convenience; at the tip of ones fingers is a powerful computing device capable of making ones life simpler and aiding in maintaining organization. For all the advances in mobile computing, the modern digital oscilloscope is still not particularly convenient it is large and unwieldy, often weighing a great deal and requiring a fairly permanent home. Our goal is to develop a portable oscilloscope solution that is significantly more convenient than traditional oscilloscopes. We will strive for a low cost and low power design, and intend to use a familiar form factor for the oscilloscope probe. We aim to utilize a common wireless standard (Bluetooth) to transmit compressed data to PCs and mobile computing devices (PDAs), serving as a truly portable oscilloscope. The probe will be outfitted to perform data collection tasks and communicate the data wirelessly to the portable computing device, where the user interface will be implemented. The goal is to develop an oscilloscope solution that is both convenient and affordable to all engineers.

The first stage of our hardware design centered on the Orbit-EDU board provided to all of the computer engineering design groups under Dr. Lin Zhong. It possesses a number of generic devices useful for building and testing embedded devices, and what it lacks in power it makes up in versatility. At the core of the OrbitEDU board is a TI MSP430 low-power microcontroller. To sample the analog input, we use the MSP430 onboard ADC, which provides 12 bit samples at a rate of 8 kHz. However, as we could not regulate the input voltages, we were limited to reading signals on the range of 0 to 3.3 V, effectively restricting us to a very small number of signals, and to a quantization step of about 1 mV. Additionally, due to the overhead required to maintain the Bluetooth connection, we were unable to get the full 8 kHz data rate from the ADC; in the end, we were sampling at 2 kHz and using nearly every cycle available to us. As we devote nearly every cycle in stage one to sampling data, transmitting data, or maintaining Bluetooth, in this stage there is no feedback received from the display device, greatly restring the features available to the user. In order to meet our design goals, we needed to design our own probe, leading us to stage two of the design.

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Hardware Design Phase Two

Software Design

An inherent shortcoming of using a PDA for waveform display is the comparatively low refresh rate of these devices. Not only must the client be able to receive and process large sets of data, but it must be able to continuously display the output waveform with no noticeable delay. National Instrument's LabView PDA tool provides an elegant and reasonably straight-forward solution to this problem. By building the front end of our client binary with LabView PDA, we are able to abstract issues such as refresh rate and scaling to a third-party tool dedicated to such optimizations. This results in very quick turnaround and more time and energy being able to be devoted to the technical aspects of the oscilloscope probe and expanding its feature set. One critical shortcoming of LabView PDA is its inability to interface with generic Bluetooth drivers. The PC build of any given program is only compatible with the Windows Bluetooth drivers while the PPC build of the same program is only compatible with the WinComm drivers. This can be overcome by treating the Bluetooth as a COM port. The largest drawback of the current software is the lack of an automatic sweep mode; in the current implementation, sweep must be done manually.

The second stage of our hardware design centered on a custom board that we designed, the oscillo-probe board. The board has three principle components an analog-to-digital converter, a DSP, and a Bluetooth module. The Bluetooth module is identical to that used in stage one. The ADC acquires 16-bit samples at 2 megasamples per second. These particular values were chosen to balance quantization step, sampling period, and power consumption.

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One of the biggest issues with phase two of our hardware design is data transmission simple math can show that, with the numbers mentioned above, if one assumes that the probe can use the full 700 kbps available with the Bluetooth connection, the probe must compress the data at a rate of 46:1.

Standard compression methods failed us, so we utilize a method that allows us to transmit only as much data as can be displayed to the user. The devices used for displaying the sampled waveform average a refresh rate of only 60 Hz. This means that the probe only needs to transmit a screen image once every 16 ms, rather than every 0.5 ms. By time slicing the transmitted data, we can reduce the data rate to 500 kbps. We realize this would leave out significant sections of data. Stage three, future work, would add a significant amount of memory to the probe to allow for a full waveform dump.

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Given that the bottleneck for data transmission is Bluetooth, stage two of our design implements triggering and waveform scaling in hardware. This requires the software to transmit the current scale of the screen to the probe, and provide any triggering conditions input by the user.

Future Work

The stage one design works quite well and runs in an impressively stable fashion. Stage two is relatively untested, and needs additional work to be used as part of the full system. The broader accomplishment of this project is the development of a very modular framework; each interface has been designed such that a simple swap of any given component can be made without significant change to the whole of the design. As the research and hardware established to date has been proven to be of very solid and robust design, future work would focus on implementing additional software features, such as waveform analysis and automatic sweep, the design of a stage three board, and user tests.

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