Arduino and Tcl/Tk

Arduino Tcl/Tk Signal processing Open-source software

Projects

Arduino Tcl/Tk — First Steps

In this first book, we take a brief look at Tcl/Tk, a simple yet versatile general-purpose interpreted language that is widely used in electronics, particularly in FPGA environments. Tcl also comes with Tk, its graphical toolkit, which makes it even more appealing. Tcl is already powerful enough on its own, but Tk adds an extra dimension. As an added benefit, you can use Tcl/Tk not only for electronics projects, but also to create your own desktop and mobile applications.

TEA5767 FM Radio

Control an FM radio from your computer using Arduino and Tcl/Tk.

This project uses the well-known TEA5767 module and an Arduino as the hardware interface. The radio is controlled from a Tcl/Tk application running on the computer.

One of the most interesting features of the project is that the graphical interface can be customized with different skins, so you can experiment with GUI design as well.

Arduino TEA5767 Tcl/Tk Starkit

OSCAR and OSCARET

Build, use, and explore your own digital oscilloscope.

OSCAR began with a very simple idea: to see how far an Arduino UNO could be pushed as a data-acquisition system, while a computer handled sample display and processing.

The project eventually grew to include OSCARET, which uses dedicated hardware to achieve much higher acquisition rates.

Arduino UNO CA3306 Tcl/Tk DHT Spectral analysis

Among other things, you can experiment with:

• data acquisition and analog-to-digital conversion;
• sampling rate;
• triggering;
• waveform display;
• automatic measurements;
• spectral analysis using the Hartley Transform;
• spectral windows;
• noise, SINAD, and ENOB;
• exporting samples to CSV.

Books

The projects on this page are also part of a series of books in which I use Arduino and Tcl/Tk as tools for learning electronics and programming by building real projects.

Arduino, Tcl/Tk, and How to Build an Oscilloscope

The development of OSCAR and OSCARET provides the thread that ties together an exploration of what happens inside a digital oscilloscope.

Starting with an Arduino UNO and two wires, the project gradually introduces signal acquisition, ADCs, sampling rate, serial communication, graphical interfaces, triggering, spectral analysis, and effective resolution.

The goal is not simply to build the instrument, but to understand why it works, where its limits are, and what happens when we push the hardware beyond what it was originally designed to do.