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Click on the black box to see what's inside
The Palm Oscilloscope project is an attempt to use a Palm PDA as an
oscilloscope. The portability and availability of Palm PDAs make them ideal
for data acquisition and display applications. Also, because many of the
target users already have Palm computers, adding oscilloscope features
to a Palm would cost much less than purchasing a complete portable oscilloscope.
In this project, a Palm is used to display waveforms that are received
through the serial port from a BlackBox. The BlackBox is a device which
samples the analog signals and transmits them to the Palm using a specific
communications protocol.
In order to maximize the usability of this product, no hardware changes are required of the PDA. All communication is performed through the built in serial port.
The Palm-O-Scope is a small program that runs on a Palm-compatible PDA. It provides the user interface to the Palm Oscilloscope, by scaling and displaying the measured waveforms. These measurements come from the other half of the Palm Oscilloscope, the BlackBox.
The BlackBox is responsible for measuring analog signals and transmitting
the results to a PDA. The exact implementation can vary considerably. For
the Palm Oscilloscope project, two BlackBoxes have been designed, one of
which has been implemented and demonstrated. The BlackBoxes communicate
with the host (the PDA) using the BlackBox Protocol. This protocol provides
much freedom for the PDA oscilloscope.
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