2026-08-23
Channel: BTT Lab (134 subscribers)
Building an oscilloscope from scratch is one of those projects that forces you to confront the ugly realities of high-speed data acquisition — ADC sampling rates, memory bandwidth, DMA choreography, and the subtle art of not dropping samples. This second installment from BTT Lab tackles the natural next step after a single-channel proof of concept: expanding to three simultaneous channels at 6 MSPS aggregate throughput.
The description highlights three technical pillars that make this worth watching: DMA (Direct Memory Access, which lets the ADC dump samples straight into RAM without waking the CPU), triple regular conversion mode (an STM32 ADC feature that interleaves conversions across multiple ADC peripherals so channels are sampled in near-parallel rather than sequentially), and the resulting 6 MSPS combined rate. Getting all three working together is a genuine embedded engineering challenge — you have to configure the ADCs in the right master/slave arrangement, allocate DMA streams that won't collide, and ensure the timing is deterministic enough to reconstruct waveforms cleanly.
With only 134 subscribers, this is exactly the kind of small-channel deep-dive that rewards attention. Even if you never build the scope yourself, the techniques translate directly to any STM32 project needing high-throughput analog capture: motor control feedback, audio processing, or sensor fusion.
