For the robot enthusiast nothing is more helpful than your trusty Oscope. Equivlent to the a cowboy's trusty steed. Your faithful oscope will deliver you out of the most hairy situations. When things are dark and the blue smoke looms about you, who's gonna rescue? The Oscope !
Originally I got an old cathode nag many years ago at a surplus auction. Didn't know the first thing about it, but I found the on switch. I slowly turned green and a line formed. Next came experiments without probes. It was a grumpy old beast and sometimes it did not even get up. (the cathode had problems)
Now the price for good digital oscopes has come way down. - This one (DSO Nano) looks like a uber-geek merit badge.
Then there is the non-Oscopes.
When is an Oscope not an Oscope? - Clever hobbiests have created there own oscopes when bought solutions have been impossible.
- Tim Withum created an Xoscope from sound cards and clever software.
- Fritsl with sound files
- ArduinoScope has been the cumulination of several people for a slick oscilliscope front end working on the Arduino board
So whats the point of having an oscope, but to define values of circuits to make robots do interesting stuff. Or to trouble shoot circuits. For example if you want bot to avoid colliding with a wall, and you have a Sharp IR sensor you would hook it up to say an Arduino and examine the analog inputs to determine the correct value to stop. You might find a ratio of distance to analog value. At a certain distance/value you want the robot to turn around. Well wouldn't it be cool if the oscope was part of the robot !?!
I now give you RobOscope !
At some point I will incorporate creating Alerts through the GUI, so that other parts of the system can be notified if some trace crosses a threshold. (Yeah I know the "mean" is off :P ) ..
Since the GUI operates in an Applet - You can Live-Stream your problem circuits to your friends, how fun !?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW29uEidKjI?hl=en