Red Pitaya and SmartScope makes your smartphone or tablet an oscilloscope

When National Instruments developed its virtual instrumentation product, it created a new market and helped many design engineers to explore personal computer as a test and measurement platform. The availability of affordable PCs with every design engineer was market driver at that time to leverage PC/laptop as test and measurement platform with some less costing external data acquisition hardware and software. National Instruments thrived on that model and there are many other small companies offering USB DAQ which are called as USB/PC oscillo-scope. But now with the most of the electronic design engineers having smart phone, it is just plain common sense of electronics engineer to have an option to use them as test and measurement display if not as platform. This has giving new direction to the development of virtual instrumentation. The data acquisition hardware combined with a computing platform can now be developed in small form factor hardware of size less than credit card. This concept has given birth to two interesting virtual instrumentation products now available in the market. They are smartscope from Lab-nation and the Red Pitaya. Good thing about these two products are, they are open source projects. Both are designed using Xilinx FPGAs. The signal frequency and amplitude of the virtual scope displayed on the mobile phone can be controlled through normal...