I was selected as a 2012 recipient of the Estes H. and Vashti L. Magoon Award for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Engineering, Purdue University! The award was presented at the graduate student awards luncheon, along with a nice meal and a huge piece of cheesecake. Thanks to all my students for putting up with me during all my classes.
One of the more difficult concepts for my ECE207 students to understand is that of using the oscilloscope in XY mode to view Lissajous figures. When thinking of a way to demonstrate this idea, I thought of hooking the audio output from a laptop to the scope’s channels to play audio. Better yet, use the laptop audio out as a fancy function generator.
Not finding any quick (or free) solutions that would do what I wanted, I came up with this python script. It generates and mixes up to three sine waves on both left and right channels, with each sine independently adjustable in frequency, amplitude, and phase. Then I went overboard and added a real-time graphical depiction of the XY plot generated by the current signals. Continue reading