The Oscilloscope Artist

The Oscilloscope Artist originally appeared in the November, 1975 isssue of Popular Electronics.
It creates all sorts of fascinating moving geometric patterns on an oscilloscope screen.

It took me 24 years to build one.

All you need is a low bandwidth 'scope with horizontal and vertical inputs.

A reconstruction of the complete article is in a pdf file. All the original parts are still available!

The original block diagram is a bit confusing so I redrew it. Oscillators A & D create a Lissajous figure baseline from triangle/square waves. Oscillators B & C are multiplied and summed with A & B.

To make things interesting, C is 90 degrees out of phase between the multipliers. All the oscillators are sync'd to A, which is ~60Hz. All this produces complex patterns which move and shift.

This simple circuit has a lot of potential. The individual sections could be brought out to normalized jacks, making the whole thing patchable. One obvious mod would be to add sine shapers to A & B, producing the more familiar ellipsoidal baseline. A staircase generator would be interesting to see as well. And you can always replace C with an external signal (and add a sync output).

If you have a modular synth you may be able to patch this up right now (got two ring modulators?). The only thing you might have to add are the phase shift networks.

Download the pdf (~3.8 MB)

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