Lissajous Art Circuits for O-Scopes

Regardless of whether you call it a Lissajous pattern or 'quadrature art,' there is a coolness about feeding signals into the X and Y axes of an oscilloscope and watching the patterns that emerge on the CRT (or possibly LCD these days) display. Using static waveshapes can create amazing-enough Etch-A-Sketch type drawings, but animating the on-screen patterns with time-varying signals into one or both axes really spiffs up the results. This short article by Russ Williams on the EDN website presents a few simple circuits for generating some of the quadrature art examples shown in the thumbnail below. A solderless breadboard, quad opamp IC, and a handful of resistors, capacitors, and inductors will get you started. For test equipment, a simple DC power supply, a waveform generator capable of outputting sine, square, and triangle signals, and, of course, an oscilloscope, are all that are needed.

Of course actual hardware in the form of an arbitrary waveform generator and an oscilloscope is not required to enjoy the show - indeed software emulation will get the job done - any other method loses much of the awe and mesmerizing factor.

Posted September 25, 2013

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