Thursday, December 6

A Christmas Tree for your Lab

It seems like holiday decorations come up earlier and earlier every year. You might not have room for a full-blown tree in your lab, but if you have an arbitrary waveform generator and a scope, Tektronix has a way for you to show your spirit electronically.

You can see the video below. Naturally, it features Tektronix gear, but we are pretty sure you could make it work with any arbitrary waveform generator that has at least two channels and a scope with an XY mode.

The key to making this easy isn’t a Tektronix app. It is WebPlotDigitizer, a web page that helps you load data and extract X and Y coordinates from it. This is actually a very useful tool for any sort of data extraction you might need on an image or plotted data, so it is a rather handy thing to have in your toolbox.

Once you have the coordinates, you have to split the X values into one signal and the Y values into the other channel. It is hard to picture it making the shape you defined until you switch to XY mode and there it is.

Of course, not being satisfied, they used a third channel to add some garland, too. We’ve seen plenty of function generators you could press into this kind of service. We even rolled our own.

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