Have a Heart

Many years ago I purchased an ADC-100 and it has given and is continuing to give excellent service.

One of the first circuits to be constructed, as a student project, was a pulse indicator. With an opto–sensor clipped to the ear lobe and the addition of a simple amplifier the ADC-100 was an ideal way of recording the heartbeat as shown in Figure 1.

 

 

Figure 1: Heart beat as monitored by an ear–lobe sensor

The figure shows that there are approximately six beats in five seconds so the heartrate is about 72 beats per minute.

The apparatus (Figure 2) was resurrected for this article.

 

 

Figure 2: Using an ADC-100 to transfer signals to a Compaq Armada computer

At a later date a data logger was required and an ADC-11 was purchased. As with the PicoScope, the logger has been used for many student experiments.

The original documentation was dispatched from Broadway House, 149–151 St Neots Road, Hardwick and the User manual was version 1.0 revision 3. At an early stage the software for the PicoScope was enhanced with the provision of 32–bit operation and this gave an improved performance.

As microelectronics (and the PC in particular) has made rapid advances over the past two decades the performance of PicoScopes and Pico products in general has been proportionately improved, as with the PicoScope 3204 for example. But the ADC-100 and ADC-11 are still being used and heartbeats are still being tested.

This application note was the winner of the
‘Oldest Scope in Use Competition’, July 2011.