Retro displays - don’t throw out that old oscilloscope!

I stumbled across this quite by accident.

Remember physics lessons at school, on the few and far between days that you got to lug an oscilloscope across the classroom to your desk and hooked it up to measure signals coming off circuitry or motors. I can barely remember why we ever used them.

But fear not. In this age of LCD and plasma displays, the old oscilloscope is not quite dead. Turns out that they’re not just limited to sine waves and simple lines. Oh no. Switch it onto X/Y-mode, and feed it some music from a PC’s sound-card, X connected to right channel, Y to the left.

This is the kind of magic you can produce.

Turns out, that with a bit of effort, you can use it as a display for a game of Tetris too.

You can read more about it on Lars Pontoppidan’s blog. Lars is a Danish electrical engineer/software developer with an interest in embedded electronics. He comments:

“The first english words I ever knew were LOAD RUN LIST IF THEN etc. because my older brothers taught me how to program the C64.”

Probably no more power hungry than a plasma display either!