Turning an Oscilloscope into a Video Display with an ESP32

To most people, an oscilloscope is a just a mysterious tech tool that’s most useful as a movie prop in a geek’s workshop. But for makers and hackers, it’s the ultimate diagnostic tool. They’re useful for measuring and analyzing all kinds of things, and as it turns out they can be a cool way to display video too.

If you’re lucky enough to have your own oscilloscope with an X/Y raster function, Bitluni has a tutorial on how to use it to play video using an ESP32. Oscilloscopes have many different modes, so you’ll need to check yours to be sure, but most newer digital models can display a series of points as a raster image. All that’s required is an X and Y coordinate for each point, in the form of a specific voltage level somewhere between 0 and 3.3V.

Using the code provided by Bitluni, you simply monitor two of the ESP32’s pins (in this case, a LOLIN32, but any ESP32 will do) on your oscilloscope. Bitluni’s code provides two methods for displaying content: a 3D STL file that’s stored in an Arduino header file, or realtime video from a camera connected to a second ESP32.

As you can imagine, the goal here isn’t to provide anything like high definition video. But, it’s a fun project that’s great for learning about how the functions of your oscilloscope work.