I have recently obtained an OWON digital oscilloscope (PDS5022S) from in the UK (approx £225 2009). Several very similar versions are available, all very competitively priced. These Chinese oscilloscopes are definitely not as well built as the more expensive laboratory grade ones from Agilent, Tektronix and the others but they do still represent good value for money for most general purpose applications. They are excellent for schools, hobbyists and for general purpose work. However if you were using one all day you might prefer a brighter CRT screen.

BATTERY PACK HACK As this probably invalidates your warranty it is totally at your own risk! The first improvement concerns the addition of a battery pack in order to make the oscilloscope a little more portable. The standard product offers a battery pack as a very expensive option (£60). Clearly this can be improved. In my case I don't actually need hours of use, just a few minutes would normally be enough to get some provisional readings to justify either bringing jobs into the workshop or running an extension lead or rigging up a remote supply.

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Therefore a number of rechargeable NiMH cells would probably do the trick. A visit to POUNDLAND (where everything costs £1) soon obtained a total of 6 rechargeable AA cells for a total cost of £3.

Opening the battery compartment on the rear of the oscilloscope showed that there was easily enough room for these six cells. Measuring the voltage across the charging points when mains powered, showed 8.4v. Thus 6 cells giving 7.2 v would allow them to be charged without further modification.

Note that the polarity is NOT the way you would expect! The RED wire is the POSITIVE one. The batteries were connected together in series with some insulated wire. The battery pack was reinforced using some double sided tape and a couple of pieces of cardboard. Two more pieces of card prevent the batteries from sliding around the inside of the compartment.

I soldered the wires directly to the battery tags. OK, so its not brilliant and the batteries only last half an hour but at 1/20 the price I don't care! Note that in order to charge them up, you ned to turn on the oscilloscope and select the correct menu items. SPECTRUM ANALYSER One of the really great things about a digital osciloscope is that the waveform can be exported to a computer. It can this be saved, printed, e-mailed or even subjected to further analysis. The OWON scope comes with a Windows driver and some very basic software.

This software is mostly written using JAVA but unfortunately it's not possible to easily write your own code without doing a little reverse engineering. If you want to analyse the data from the oscilloscope in Windows you basically have to use the OWON applicaton to grab the data and then export the data file in text format to be analysed by another application such as Excel. This is alright if you only need to analyse a few waveforms but is a real nuisance if you want to analyse lots of data.

Not only that but it is also a bit difficult to automate certain operations such as implementing a As usual I wanted a LINUX implementation because it would be much easier to write a short script to evaluate data on my LINUX machine. Initially I had intended to start reverse-engineering the oscilloscope myself but then discovered that this had already been done. The application called 'Owondump' is written by Michael Murphy. You can download the latest source code from Although these files are provided as source code, it is really easy to compile and the instructions are excellent. On my laptop PC it compiled in just a few seconds! On my machine all I had to do was follow the instructions: 1. Download the owondump-0.2.tar.gz. Dvd the longest day.

Then extract the files to a suitable working directory. You also need to download and install gnuplot (using synaptic package manager) gcc (almost certainly already on your PC) GNU make (almost certainly already on your PC) libusb-0.1-4 - and libusb-0.1-4 dev If they are not already installed.

Actually you only need GnuPlot if you intend to use it to plot the captured data. Compile everything yourself using gcc. Just open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you extracted the files. At the command line type the folowing (some machines may require you to do this as root). Gcc -lusb -o owondump owondump.c and gcc -lusb -o owonfileread owonfileread.c This creates two executable files called owondump and owonfileread.